Right-winger or Rahul fan? Vaidik can be either, say former colleagues

Ved Pratap Vaidik, 70, is now a very famous man in India, and in all likelihood will remain so until the next big news story breaks. The ‘senior journalist’ has hit the headlines for meeting Hafiz Saeed, the head of terror group Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is also the political arm of the Lashkar-e-Toiba. And despite the popular backlash against him for meeting the conspirator of the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai, Vaidik would be loving the limelight right now, his friends and acquaintances have said.

Believed to be close to both Baba Ramdev and the RSS, Vaidik’s colleagues in the media say he has always been publicity hungry and can swing between ideologies with ease.

One senior journalist told The Economic Times , “He can be a socialist, a right-winger, a Rahul Gandhi fan or a spiritually inclined person depending upon his company and the prevalent mood of the day.” This journalist worked with Vaidik when the latter was the “founder-editor of Hindi news agency Bhasha”. Bhasha is the Hindi service from PTI.

Others told the paper that Vaidik was made editor of Press Trust of India’s Hindi service as he was believed to be close to “then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s adviser P N Haksar.”

Vaidik reportedly told television channels that Saeed denied all the allegations against him pertaining to 26/11. Further, he said, “I was very pleased when Saeed said he would welcome Mr Modi in Pakistan. Hafiz Saeed asked me about Narendra Modi. He said Modi is dangerous and now he has become the Prime Minister of India. He said that Modi is dangerous for the whole of South Asia. I said that his thinking is not right. There is no need to fear Modi.”

Where Vaidik’s love for Modi and Sangh is concerned, it is very much a new found one, reports said. As the ET report points out, back in 2009 when public perception favoured UPA, Vaidik “wrote a gushing piece in praise of Rahul Gandhi. Referring to a meeting with the Gandhi scion in Kabul, he said that he found the young man extremely engaging, intelligent and the right person to lead the country.” By 2011, when the Anna movement was its height, Vaidik was part of that and protesting the UPA.

This is also not the first time that Vaidik has made sensational claims (such as his claim that he convinced Saeed not to hate Modi). Another journalist told ET that Vaidik once claimed that the late PM PV Narashima Rao wanted Vaidik as his deputy and that “Vajpayee wanted him to mediate with the Taliban during the hijacking of IC 814 in 1999”.

From the remarks of his former colleagues, it’s evident that Vaidik enjoys getting his fifteen minutes of fame. As Firstpost editor Sandip Roy had noted in this piece  the brouhaha over this meeting tends to overlook the fact that this is largely a PR stunt.

Roy wrote, “Until yesterday most Indians had not heard of Ved Pratap Vaidik even though he has been around for a while and is close to Baba Ramdev. He was basically the kind of man whose network of connections put him on junkets like the one that took him to Pakistan along with Salman Khurshid thanks to the Regional Peace Institute which has Mani Shankar Aiyar as its board member.”

Agencies also reported that as a PhD student at the School of International Studies in JNU, Vaidik had insisted on writing his thesis in Hindi, which led to his expulsion from the school but evoked nationwide response after the issue was raised in Parliament.

For the past many years, Vaidik has been associated with Ramdev, who also supports propagation of Hindi.