Kailash Vijayvargiya has visage of a chimpanzee, writes former Meghalaya and Tripura governor Tathagata Roy in his memoir

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, July 11

BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya “had the visage of a chimpanzee with a drooping moustache, and when he talked normally one got the impression that he was grimacing”, former West Bengal BJP chief and former Meghalaya and Tripura governor Tathagata Roy has written in his 500-page memoir ‘Desires, Dreams and Powers’.

“One’s looks do matter in politics,” Roy wrote about Vijayvargiya who is now the Minister of Urban Welfare & Housing and Parliamentary Affairs in Madhya Pradesh.

On his return to Kolkata after the end of his tenure at the Shillong Raj Bhavan, Roy found that affairs of the BJP in West Bengal were run by a quartet comprising Vijayvargiya, Shiv Prakash, Aravind Menon and the state BJP president Dilip Ghosh.

Roy wrote that while Shiv Prakash, a senior sangha pracharak, struck him as a sensible person, he faced a police case of moral turpitude. Aravind Menon, once a sangha pracharak, married a woman half his age after his release from West Bengal. Dilip Ghosh, also a sangha pracharak, was educated only up to higher secondary and had a fitter mistry’s certificate from an industrial training institute.

There were allegations that Ghosh falsified his qualifications, as he declared in the affidavit filed before the 2014 assembly election that he held a diploma in engineering from Jhargram Polytechnic. The polytechnic denied this claim, Roy, himself an engineer by training, wrote.

Roy, who met Vijaivargiya in Delhi sometime back, found him in a different frame of mind in Kolkata. “He politely informed me that my position and role would be decided by the central leadership because I was too significant for him to handle. With my experience in politics, I knew these were ominous words, suggesting that he might not include me in the electoral process if he could avoid it,” Roy wrote.

Roy also had discussions with Shiv Prakash, who was more receptive, but like many sangha pracharaks, he tended to listen more than talk. “Arvind Menon left the impression that he was of lesser importance, so I did not spend much time with him.”

Next, Roy met Dilip Ghosh. At that time, he resided in a mansion owned by a businessman named Sethia, located far from Kolkata, Roy wrote.

Roy wrote that the BJP’s campaign in the 2021 West Bengal assembly election can serve as an instruction manual on how not to contest an election.