New Delhi: He has never been shy of speaking, but doing it before the camera is one thing and addressing large public gatherings like a political leader is another, says Praveen Khandelwal, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) candidate from Delhi’s Chandni Chowk Lok Sabha constituency.
But, 64-year-old Khandelwal now seems to have mastered the art. With nine days to go for the polls, he has been traversing localities in the parliamentary constituency, addressing public gatherings one after another.
Khandelwal is a law graduate and a generational businessman. He owns a wholesale hardware business and has showrooms in some of the most expensive markets in Delhi. His family, he says, has been doing business in Old Delhi since the early-1900s.
The ongoing general election is Khandelwal’s first brush with politics.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
But he is a popular face, who can be regularly seen on TV news panels talking about government policies and issues that affect traders, claiming to represent around eight crore small business owners in the country collectively under the umbrella of the Confederation of All India Traders – a traders’ body that he heads.
His claim to fame was protests against Chinese goods across India after the India-China skirmish in the Galwan river valley in 2020. One may recall social media videos of people smashing electronic goods going viral. It coincided with those protests.
In March 2021, Khandelwal was back in headlines for a pan-India protest against one of the richest persons in the world – Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.
The reason for the protest was Amazon bypassing Indian laws that restrict e-commerce sites from selling their own goods – a policy aimed at protecting the interests of small domestic businesses. It was the time when the deadliest wave of Covid-19 had started showing signs of upsurge and the pandemic-related restrictions on large gatherings did not allow a big protest to be held in the national capital.
But Khandelwal found a way out with the help of the internet. Traders, connected through a Zoom call, organised smaller gatherings across cities as they burned effigies with Bezos’s photographs and chanted “Amazon Go back”. Later in the same day, Khandelwal was on some television news channels elaborating on the issue.
This happened two months after the e-commerce giant faced widespread protests by Hindutva groups in India for a televised series on Amazon Prime which they accused of mocking Hindu deities.
Khandelwal epitomises the burly “lala-ji” of Old Delhi, who have been traditional supporters of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later the BJP. For the longest time, BJP was called a Brahman-Baniya party, a perception which the party has been trying to break because of its electoral growth backed by Dalits and other backward classes (OBCs) especially after the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
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Khandelwal’s entire family is a supporter of the Sangh – a larger Hindu nationalist ecosystem of which the BJP is the political arm. Several Delhi-based BJP leaders said that Khandelwal is known to be close to several union ministers and top BJP leaders.
To highlight Khandelwal’s network and influence, many politicians of the saffron party cite one example. In 2020, a three-day visit to India by Bezos did not feature any meetings with any minister or top government official. There was buzz that he would meet Modi but that did not happen. It might have come as a surprise for many because Bezos was given a red-carpet welcome in 2014, but not Khandelwal.
Khandelwal was strongly lobbying against Bezos, and had reached out to several ministers and top BJP leaders urging them to give a cold shoulder to the Amazon chief. Even as Bezos spoke in a gathering for small business owners in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, trader bodies led by Khandelwal protested outside the venue. As Bezos left India, Khandelwal perhaps had the last laugh.
Delhi goes to polls on May 25 and Khandelwal now has to prove his political mettle. His main contender is J.P. Aggarwal of the Congress, who has been a member of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. The 79-year-old Congress leader represented the Chandni Chowk seat from 1984 to 1991.
Both Khandelwal and Aggarwal belong to the Baniya community.
The Chandni Chowk seat covers large parts of Old Delhi, which are essentially bustling markets with massive footfall on most days. Chandni Chowk, Ballimaran, Matia Mahal and Sadar Bazar – all of them are part of the parliamentary constituency – collectively seem like a world of their own. A world with open drains, dilapidated structures and live wires crisscrossing the skies like a spider’s web. A world in which small traders and rickshaw-pullers jostle for space alike. A world of honking cars and narrow alleys. A world in which the merchants decide who shall best represent them.