When LK Advani dropped a bomb in Delhi by resigning from three key forums of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on June 10 and the party went into a huddle, a key party functionary, known for his reputation as the troubleshooter, flew in from Hyderabad to meet the sulking leader. P Muralidhar Rao, recently made the national general secretary of the party, has travelled with Advani during many of his yatras. Known to be the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) face in the BJP, Rao is equally at ease in communicating  with the party patriarch, the RSS and other key players of the Sangh Parivar.
Having worked out many crises in the party from behind the curtains for years, Rao is now handpicked for the bigger ones. Like, for instance, the crucial role he played during the backroom parleys in the aftermath of Advani’s resignation.

Quite unlike his peers, Rao draws similarity to the former BJP ideologue KN Govindacharya, who maintained a delicate balance between the ideology and political exigencies.

That Rao’s idealism is also tinged with pragmatism became evident in the manner in which he acted as the troubleshooter in another recent crisis within the BJP over the choice of the party president. Few know that Rao played a crucial link between the BJP leadership and the RSS when Nitin Gadkari’s position was compromised over allegations of corruption against him.

Given his deep understanding of Indian politics, Rao knew it too well that the party had to negotiate a way out of the crisis. He was equally at ease in communication with Advani, Mohan Bhagwat, S Gurumurthy and the party president.

When Rajnath Singh was chosen as the president, Rao took up the mantle of the troubleshooter once again.

In his political journey, Rao has skilfully negotiated many precarious twists and turns that often found him on the wrong side of the BJP stalwarts. And, yet, in his 49th year, P Muralidhar Rao has emerged as the most powerful general secretary of the party.

He shot to limelight when he launched a scathing attack on the 13-day Vajpayee government in 1996 for giving sovereign guarantee to the infamous US energy giant Enron. In his statement as convenor of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), Rao called it a “great betrayal”. From 1998 to 2004, he and the Swadeshi lobby within the Sangh Parivar virtually breathed down the neck of the Vajpayee government and stalled many liberalisation moves. And it was in this context that reformists within the Vajpayee government used to call Rao and his organisation SJM as a “tolerable nuisance”. He was tolerable because he graduated into politics from the nursery of the Sangh Parivar. His unflinching faith in the RSS values and his pragmatic understanding of the socio-political scenario stood him in good stead when he came into conflict with the BJP stalwarts. Despite this antecedent, his induction in the BJP at the decision-making level was taken as a natural corollary to his career path.

Perhaps to understand Muralidhar Rao, one needs to understand his background. Born in the Maoist-affected Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh, Rao’s brush with the radical Left pushed him to the Right metaphorically. When he was 17 years old during the Emergency and the subsequent Janata government experiment, he chose ‘nationalist ideology’ over ‘violent class struggle’.

“The concept of social change of the ultra-Left was not in sync with me. The ultra-Left people also worked for the cause of the poor but their method was undemocratic and violent,” says Muralidhar Rao. “I am a product of post-emergency period,” he adds. His village, Korapalli, is just 20 km from where former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao was born.

But the association with RSS and then with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) was not smooth for him. In fact, he was a target of the Naxalites all through his students’ politics days. “Several of my colleagues got killed by the ultra-Leftist,” he says. When he joined ABVP in the 1980s, it was not a force in the district. It was due to Rao’s effort that ABVP became a dominant force in the whole of Telangana. But not without a price he had to pay – a bullet shot from a pointblank range.

Bulletproof ideology
By the time Rao enrolled for his postgraduation studies at Osmania University, he had already cut his teeth in students’ politics. A popular leader on the campus, he was soon elected general secretary of Osmania University Students’ Union. “My popularity brought me in ideological conflict with ultra-Left ideology and organisations active in Warangal and Hyderabad districts,” Rao says as he reflects on the incident which changed his life.

On a fine afternoon in November 1986, after lunch at the university hostel, Rao had barely stepped outside when he was surrounded by ultras. Without a word, question or exchange of glances, he was shot at from close range. The bullet pierced his chest – only a thin skin protected it from hitting the heart. As blood oozed out of his body Rao ran to protect himself. He was chased up to good length till he found the police station. From there, he was immediately sent to a local hospital. A team of doctors soon operated on him. He was saved but took a few months to recover.

“That was destiny. Maine goli khayi hai (I have faced a bullet),” he says.

Twenty-six years after the incident, the scar is still there, both in the body and mind. He has many pellets still left in his chest, Rao says. “At least 18 of them are still there. I have been carrying these pellets since 1986 when I was hit by Leftist extremist forces. It is difficult to operate and get it out. They are part of my body now,” says Rao.

But that life-threatening incident did not go unnoticed. He was soon spotted by the top brass of the RSS and sent to Rajasthan, where he worked towards building the organisation. He trained in organisational matters in the rough and tumble of rural areas. His efforts built success and ABVP soon became a dominant force on the varsity campuses of Rajasthan. He lived there for three years. After that, during the height of militancy in Jammu & Kashmir, he was involved in building the party at the grassroots level.

“As anti-India forces indulged in terror and violence in the Kashmir valley, I played a key role in organising a historic march of students and ABVP activists from Jammu to Srinagar.”

A meteoric rise
Rao joined BJP only in 2009 when he was attached to then president Rajnath Singh. In four years of his political career in the BJP, he became a national secretary and then rose to become a general secretary of the party in the third term of Rajnath Singh as the party president. His intentions are clear as the party has its eyes fixed on the next general election.

Andhra Pradesh is important in the party’s scheme of things. Despite presence in the state for a long time, the party has not been able to perform very well there. “I want to correct the image. As people are becoming anti-Congress in the state, it is the right time to connect with the masses and bring them in the party fold,” says Rao.

A student of political psychology, Rao has an unparalleled grasp of Southern politics because of his association with a series of movements for the marginalised people, several of which he led from the front. A pragmatist to the core, he realises the mistakes the party committed in the recently concluded Karanataka polls. “We will learn from the Karnataka defeat and build our future here,” he says succinctly about the total rout of the party in a state considered until recently to be the Hindutva foothold in the South.