Bombay, India – Pramod Mahajan, the top strategist of India’s main opposition Hindu nationalist party, died nearly two weeks after being shot by his younger brother in an apparent family dispute. He was 56.
Mahajan died Wednesday at a Bombay hospital where he had been on life support since being shot April 22 in his Bombay apartment, said V.K. Malhotra, a spokesman for his Bharatiya Janata Party.
His death left the BJP without one of its most celebrated organizers. A fiery orator, Mahajan was a key figure in the transformation of a party once dismissed as fringe Hindu rabble-rousers. Offering flowers and prayers, tens of thousands of people poured into central Bombay to pay their last respects Thursday. Bollywood actors and India’s top businessmen joined thousands of party workers and weeping relatives.
Several BJP leaders folded their hands and bowed before Mahajan’s body, partially covered in an orange and green party flag, before the funeral cortege wound its way slowly from his apartment through the streets of Bombay.
Mahajan’s brother Pravin surrendered within an hour of the shooting last month and confessed to the police, saying he was fed up with being humiliated by his brother. Pravin was charged with attempted murder, which is expected to be upgraded to murder. Mahajan’s organizational skills were near-legend in Indian political circles.
Among his biggest successes was a 6,000-mile cross-country 1990 campaign by BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani. Traveling in a Toyota van decorated as the chariot of the Hindu god king Ram, Advani made dozens of whistle-stops.
No Indian leader had undertaken a mission of the kind – mixing politics with religious fervor – and the BJP’s nationalist message took hold across India.
