He is the man who has ripped Om Prakash Chautala’s cleverly preserved mask of being a friend of the farmers. At 70, he grew a beard to dodge the police, which had him down earlier as a proclaimed offender with a reward of Rs 10,000 on his head. The government has likened him and his union to the People’s War Group. But Ghasi Ram Nain has wielded no guns in his war against Chautala. The soft-spoken recluse behind the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) agitation in Kandela that shook the Haryana government sits on a charpoy, armed with a lathi and a mobile. For the ‘‘cause’’, Nain has even cut links with his family for the past 10 years. He did not attend the wedding of his son at his native village in Jind district. ‘‘The most difficult moment of my life when my wife rang up asking me to attend the marriage of our son Jagdeep,’’ he recalls. ‘‘I decided to miss the marriage for the cause of the farmers, who come first for me.’’ Nain hopes he will pacify them now that the stir against the arrest of BKU leaders and ‘‘high’’ power tariff is over. He flays the Haryana and central governments for not compensating farmers whose cotton crops were destroyed by the American bollworm. He says he and other farmers had even planned a trip to Europe to study farming patterns but had to back out as the then Bansi Lal government issued non-bailable warrants against him. About political ambitions, Nain says: ‘‘Abhi tak to koi vichar nahi hai lekin me koi affidavit bi nahi de sakta (No plans right now, but I am not giving an affidavit to this effect).’’
