May 05, 2024 08:20 AM IST
The last time the political leaders got together was their 25th anniversary of graduating from the school in 2017.
New Delhi: The storied Doon School in Dehradun is watching the ongoing elections with a considerable interest, with four of its alumni from the class of 1992 contesting this year. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Jitin Prasada and Raghav Lakhanpal are contesting from Uttar Pradesh, Nakul Nath is the Congress’s candidate from Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara and their batchmate Kalikesh Singh Deo is contesting the Odisha assembly elections on a Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ticket.
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Singh Deo used to be a member of Parliament till 2019, sitting in the Lok Sabha with his classmate Prasada. But the exigencies of electoral calculations took them both back to state politics. Prasada is trying to stage a comeback by winning from Varun Gandhi’s Pilibhit seat and Singh Deo is contesting the Bolangir assembly seat.
“Yes, it did come up in the school’s WhatsApp group,” said Lakhanpal. “But we are not allowed to talk about politics there. So someone simply said, ‘good luck to all those contesting’ and that was it.” Lakhanpal’s Saharanpur constituency voted in the first phase of the 2024 polls.
The political leaders from the class of 1992 do not meet often. The last time they got together was their 25th anniversary of graduating from the school in 2017.
“Politics aside, we remain good friends,’’ said Singh Deo. The BJD and the BJP are fighting each other this time, but just a couple of months ago, it looked like they could be political allies. Or, when there was talk of Nakul Nath quitting the Congress party and joining the BJP.
As far as their alma mater is concerned, political rivalries do not matter. There’s a bonhomie that comes from belonging to the same school, and in Doon’s case, it’s literally an old boys’ network. For example, Lakhanpal spoke about the time he went back to school for a reunion and they participated in a debate.
One of the parents, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra of the Congress, was the judge of the debate, so Lakhanpal in good humour objected. “I told her that she shouldn’t be the judge when I was a participant because she was Congress. She said that we BJP walas know how to talk. Guess what, I won best speaker,” he said.
“It’s interesting how the batch of 1992 from Doon has until the last Parliament always had an average of two MPs. The last election, Kalikesh lost from Bolangir by a narrow margin, and we had Nakul Nath from Chhindwara win,” said batch mate and communication consultant Shivraj Parshad. “Given that we have such a varied political spectrum running from our class, we are mindful not to make it a big deal in common groups, but wish them one on one.’’
Parshad also pointed out that having four batch mates may look like a novelty to outsiders but wasn’t really unusual for Doon. After all, it has a whole host of old boys who are now star politicians — former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Shashi Tharoor, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kamal Nath, RPN Singh, Amarinder Singh, Naveen Patnaik and Karan Singh.
HT tried to reach Nakul Nath and Jitin Prasada, but they were unavailable due to campaigning.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sunetra Choudhury is the National Political Editor of the Hindustan Times. With over two decades of experience in print and television, she has authored Black Warrant (Roli,2019), Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous (Roli,2017) and Braking News (Hachette, 2010). Sunetra is the recipient of the Red Ink award in journalism in 2016 and Mary Morgan Hewett award in 2018.
