New Delhi, May 3: Behind each forlorn gesture at the BJP headquarters today ? A.B. Vajpayee’s solemn tributes, the party flag flying at half mast, incense curling up in a room packed with tearful mourners ? was a separate story linked with Pramod Mahajan.

He was the only one, insisted a grieving party worker, who meant something to everyone in the saffron joint family. From new BJP president Rajnath Singh to the officially retired Vajpayee and perennial charioteer L.K. Advani, Mahajan has left behind people utterly dismayed at his untimely death ? not for the same reason.

The reason for Rajnath’s grief is evident to anyone who has witnessed the Uttar Pradesh satrap’s unease in the power set-up in which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has thrust him. He has, over the past five months, been mocked by his peers and bulldozed by his seniors.

Rushing to Mumbai from a yatra virtually forced on him by Advani, Rajnath was a distraught man. He had lost his only powerful ally in the unfamiliar, and often hostile, party power structure in Delhi.

“We have lost a tall leader, a person so efficient that the whole nation would feel the loss,” mumbled the BJP chief.

Rajnath’s career was given a fillip by Mahajan in the late ’80s when he made the Thakur the head of the BJP Yuva Morcha in Uttar Pradesh. He continued to guide Rajnath through the organisational jigsaw that the BJP is at the top level.

If Rajnath is now friendless in the big city, others like Vajpayee would feel the absence of their reliable fund manager. Mahajan was the face of corporate BJP, the man who helped the party forge ties with India Inc. Without him it may still have been a party of shopkeepers.

It was to him that Vajpayee and Advani would turn to raise money for elections. Mahajan was crucial to the BJP gaining financial autonomy from the Sangh: it was no accident that he was Vajpayee’s most trusted aide and organiser in the first few years of National Democratic Alliance rule.

The party as a whole is worried at the prospect of having to find another fund manager, but some are panicking plainly because their individual link to big money has been snapped.

The Sangh, too, can’t deny what it euphemistically calls “unka sahyog (his assistance)”. The number of welfare schemes he helped “organise” and pracharaks he funded are considerations that doubtless helped him get away with taking on the Sangh from time to time.

Mahajan is known to have shaped the careers of not just Rajnath but several others, too, such as party vice-president and former swayamsevak Bal Apte and spokesperson Prakash Javdekar. He inspired a level of personal loyalty quite unfamiliar to any other “second-rung” leader in the BJP.

It’s no wonder that a sea of admirers, followers and colleagues thronged the BJP headquarters as news of his death spread. It was a loss almost each mourner would have felt personally.