Jat Masala

Nevertheless Mahendra is now India8217;s best-known rubber stamp since, well, Zail Singh was sent to Rashtrapati Bhavan by India Gandhi. The maverick son of Bansi Lal 8212; once Haryana8217;s chief minister, now in oblivion 8212; has finally made it to page one, if only to have every old codger exclaiming, 8216;8216;Oh, he looks so much like his father.8217;8217;

Actually father and son don8217;t quite get along. Bansi Lal preferred younger son Surinder Singh as a political inheritor and the fact that Mahendra stayed on in the Congress rather than jump ship to his father8217;s Haryana Vikas Party didn8217;t help. Apparently, the Congress tried using Mahendra to win back his father but the message didn8217;t go through, because the medium wasn8217;t the right one.

Never mind. Before the BCCI big bash in Kolkata, Mahendra8217;s political career was a joke, limited to providing critical quotes on his father to hard-up journalists. Veteran Haryana poll watchers recall he once stood against Surinder in a Lok Sabha election and came away with all of 2,700 votes. Since then, he8217;s stuck to cricket.

Those who know Mahendra say he is both straightforward and arrogant. Pop psychologists in Jatland nod in approval, saying the two traits are often synonymous in the interiors of Haryana.

Mahendra is a lawyer by training, and occasionally practices in the local courts in Bhiwani, the town he lives in. His principal identity is, however, cricket-driven. Old-timers remember him playing in Delhi, in friendly matches between BCCI officials and politicians. Presumably, Pawar was not on the same pitch.

Mahendra says he8217;s been a cricket official for 30 years. Certainly, he8217;s fiercely guarded his control of Haryana cricket since the 1980s. In this period, Haryana won the Ranji Trophy for the first time, primarily due to the inspirational legacy of Kapil Dev, but that hasn8217;t stopped Mahendra using the achievement to embellish his CV.

Cricketers have quite another opinion on Mahendra. Kapil himself once led a player rebellion against him and 8212; apparently backed by Surinder in yet another of those cricketer-politician alliances that make cricket politics so delightful 8212; attempted to break Mahendra8217;s hold on the HCA.

Mahendra survived that election, just as he8217;ll probably survive the story about how he made life miserable for Saurav Ganguly on the present Indian captain8217;s first tour, to Australia in 1991-92. Ganguly, then a 17-year-old rookie, was pulled up by Mahendra for allegedly bad attitude. Years later, it still rankled enough for Ganguly to call Mahendra the 8216;8216;worst guy8217;8217; he had seen, a 8216;8216;shame8217;8217; on Indian cricket, capable of just the insensitivity that can destroy a young cricketer.

There8217;s a subtext to the tale. In the early 1990s, Mahendra and Dalmiya 8212; then Cricket Association of Bengal honcho and still only an emerging player in BCCI power games 8212; were factional rivals. That may explain why Mahendra took it out on a young Bengal cricketer whose family was close to Dalmiya. Today, Mahendra is happy being Dalmiya8217;s proxy. Hmm, somewhere there must lie another allegorical tale from Jatland.