Gyan Verma profiles BJP’s Anurag Thakur, of Ekta Yatra and cricket fame, a young political star with hundreds rather than thousands of followers.
Anurag Thakur, 37, MP twice over and chief of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of BJP, won’t object to being called a leader of hundreds rather than thousands. He recently took a team of party workers to Jammu & Kashmir on the Ekta Yatra. The plan was to hoist the national flag at politically sensitive Lal Chowk in Srinagar. The state government stopped the Yatra. Thakur, along with senior BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, was taken into custody at Jammu.
Is he BJP’s answer to the formidable youth brigade of the Congress — Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia and others? Enthusiastic BJP workers have begun to bracket him with Gandhi! There are superficial parallels. Like Gandhi, Thakur is from a political family. His father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, is the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh. But unlike the bachelor Gandhi, Thakur is married — into a political family. His father-in-law is Gulab Singh, the Himachal Pradesh public works minister. Married in 2002, Thakur has two sons.
There are other dissimilarities. Unlike Gandhi, Thakur was directly involved in student politics at Doaba College in Jalandhar. In 2008 Thakur fought and won a Lok Sabha by-election from his father’s constituency of Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh. A year later in the 2009 general election, he won the same seat again.
Not even three years into his political career, senior leaders of RSS and BJP are ready to lend Thakur a hand. RSS did its best to make the Ekta Yatra a success, and Thakur is reportedly a favourite of Jaitley. The rath (chariot) in which he rode more than 3,000 km from Kolkata to Jammu was given by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. It is the rath Modi has used twice to canvass Gujarati voters.
Thakur juggles politics and business, but his passion is cricket. At 25 he became the youngest president of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association, and at 26 the youngest national cricket selector. Not surprisingly, among his friends are some of the biggest names in Indian cricket. After the Indian cricket team won the Twenty20 championship, Thakur started the biggest T20 tournament ever in Himachal Pradesh. With 125 teams taking part, the tournament expects a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Thakur, who still heads HPCA, is trying to build a strong state cricket team. Indian Premier League T20 matches are now regularly played at the international cricket stadium in Dharamsala — built due to Thakur’s efforts. It is said to be the highest cricket stadium in the world. Thakur has said he hopes to have more than a dozen similar stadiums built in Himachal Pradesh, including one at Shimla, the state capital. That sure is an interesting entry strategy into national politics; will it work?