Blood brothers of Bombay

“Am I now more famous than my brother?” Pravin’s off-the-record question, soon after he had pumped three bullets into Pramod Mahajan, says more about the case than all the reams written about it. Then he added, “A couple of days ago, no one knew Pravin Mahajan. Now everyone knows me. Earlier everyone ran after Pramod Mahajan to photograph him. Now they run after me.”

It’s a sentiment a lot of killers have expressed through history, though perhaps not with such directness. There’s Oswald and John F Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan and Bobby Kennedy, the killer of John Lennon who said he was a big fan of the Beatle. Many people  seek fame through the trigger pointed at a celebrity for whom they feel a special affinity.

The Mahajan shooting, has another angle, which is uniquely Indian. That of the family. “I am the poor brother of a rich man,” Pravin Mahajan’s surrender statement said. “He treated me like dirt.” And then the chilling sentence: “I wanted to avenge my humiliation.”

His sense of humiliation came from the very Indian notion that you are beholden to your family for all time to come. If you do well, you are obliged to look after a whole network of relatives, giving them emotional and monetary support, and not just in an emergency. In short, if you are part of a family, you owe it, Big Time.

It’s clear that Pramod Mahajan discharged this obligation for many years. Mahajan sr, died in the late 1970s when his children were still young. Pramod, as the eldest, became the father figure, looking after the family. In the case of Pravin, his father-brother even chose his wife for him! Was the burden of debt too much for Pravin?

On the contrary, the more Pravin got from his older brother, the more he expected from him. And the more he got, the less he got of what he paradoxically wanted: Respect. That’s what stands out in his confession.

“When I stepped out of the lift and entered my brother’s house, he was reading a newspaper. He looked up, saw me and continued to read. When I asked him why he was ignoring me, he said he mistook me for a newspaper delivery boy.” With that insult, Pramod  Mahajan had signed his own virtual death warrant.

But there’s another aspect of this case which goes beyond aspiration and family. That has to do with the nature of Indian politics.

Lal Bahadur Shastri encountered no demands from his relatives. His personal integrity and principles were so unshakeable that no one dared seek a favour. After all, he was the Prime Minister whose own children stood in line to get college admission forms.

Shastri, unfortunately, was a very rare exception. Pramod Mahajan is more in line with today’s typical politician, whose integrity is defined by his/her fidelity to one special interest group at a time. (No double-crossing! That’s called principle in today’s politics).

Mahajan’s espousal of the Reliance cause in the telecom sector when he headed that ministry was as open as it could be, so the fact that Pravin reportedly got Rs 70,000 per month from that company for a job whose description was yet to be written has not even figured as a tiny question in any article I have read.

This taken-for-granted attitude also meant that for Pravin it was taken-for-granted largesse. “Everyone says Pramod Mahajan is worth Rs 2000 crore,” Pravin said to the police, “What is wrong if I expected him to help me? But what have I gained from him?”

Actually, a lot. Apart from a cushy job which paid for doing nothing, there was a dealership for Apollo Tyres. There was also work as a contractor, with at least three major contracts in “dummy names”.

There was even a bus deal gone sour: Pravin was supposed to sell two second-hand luxury coaches for Rs 17 lakhs. He delivered only one. 

According to the buyer, Uday Mishra, he decided to do nothing because Pravin “told me he would use his brother’s clout to book me under false criminal cases if I pursued him.” That’s a lot of favours from one brother to another.

But, since Pravin thought of his brother as someone who raked in the moolah, nothing he got was ever enough. As it happens, if Pramod Mahajan hadn’t used his clout once too often, he wouldn’t be battling for his life.

Pravin applied for a gun-licence in 1996 when the Shiv Sena-BJP ruled Maharashtra. Gopinath Munde, as Home Minister turned down the application. Pramod Mahajan intervened and Pravin got his gun.You don’t have to search far in all this to find a morality tale, do you?