A case of misplaced confidence?

In early January, Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath, aka Capt Gopinath of Air Deccan fame, announced that he was joining the Aam Admi Party, or AAP. But in less than a month, he had attacked the AAP government in Delhi twice: first on Law Minister Somnath Bharti's vigilante act, and then on the decision to ban foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail. In various statements, he called Bharti "rabid and reckless" and chastised him for behaving like a "rogue elephant". After Arvind Kejriwal sat on a dharna against the Delhi Police, Capt Gopinath said the activist-chief minister had forgotten that his allegiance was now to the state and not to his party. Kejriwal loyalists hit back at Capt Gopinath: he ought to have read the AAP manifesto before joining.

So, is he in or out of AAP? At the moment, Capt Gopinath remains in the party. In a newspaper article that talked about the benefits of healthy dissent, he called himself the "Old Turk" of AAP. For all one knows, he might be the AAP candidate from south Bangalore in the next general elections. He had contested from the constituency in 2009 as an independent candidate but lost. But there's more to his political life. In another time, Capt Gopinath had fought the elections as a candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. The details are contained in his book, Simply Fly (HarperCollins, 2009). Though he does not mention the year, I presume it was in the early 1990s.

If Capt Gopinath is to be believed, it was BJP that sought him out. He was into farming those days, and the party was trying to establish itself in Karnataka. "You are one of the most celebrated farmers of Hassan. Join the party and become its president in Hassan," a BJP member told him over the phone. After much tossing and turning, Capt Gopinath agreed. What about the party's pro-Hindu image? "I was uneasy about the reported links between BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh," he writes. "I was apprehensive too about the party's communal overtones." Capt Gopinath posed the question to the BJP leaders who assured him that "the party was a separate and independent identity". Accepting their word, Capt Gopinath joined the party.

For the next three or four years, Capt Gopinath says he visited the 500 or so villages in his constituency. The high point was when Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to Hassan to address a rally. As the district party president, it was Capt Gopinath's responsibility to do all the bandobast. After the rally, Vajpayee came to his house for dinner. (There's a photograph of the dinner in the book.) Capt Gopinath says he got into an argument with Vajpayee at the dining table. Those were the days of state-owned television, and he wanted the sector to be opened up so that the government could not misuse it. Vajpayee felt it would be a security risk. Capt Gopinath countered it would be easier for terrorists to attack one station rather than 1,000!

In the elections, Capt Gopinath was pitted against H D Deve Gowda, the Janata Dal heavyweight. While other parties were spending large sums of money, he says he decided to keep his campaign low-cost - like his airline later. It so happened that the two had organised their rallies at the same ground at Hassan on the same day: Capt Gopinath first, followed by Gowda. Capt Gopinath says that Gowda arrived a little early and the crowd deserted him completely. To get the crowds back, he began to let loose a volley of expletives in Kannada. He even threatened to raise the matter with T N Seshan, the no-nonsense chief election commissioner (1990-96). Capt Gopinath was supremely confident of victory, but lost miserably. Of the 140,000 votes polled, he got 7,000. Was his confidence in Air Deccan similarly misplaced, you could ask.

bhupesh.bhandari@bsmail.in