Rohit Chahal, 19, New Delhi
New Delhi: There’s something incongruous about model-turned-movie actor John Abraham being spoken of in the same breath as Hindutva champions Guru Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar, whose portraits loom over the spacious living room.
Rohit Chahal. Madhu Kapparath / Mint
Rohit Chahal, 19 years and eight months old, is aware of the gulf between his one-time role model Abraham and his upbringing in a family that swears by Hindu nationalism and its pantheon. Influenced by the success of Abraham,Rohit took to modelling three years ago.
“People used to tell me that I could easily be a model, given my height and build. I had seen John Abraham and, like a million others, decided to try my hand at modelling,” says Rohit, who is in the final year of a bachelor’s degree programme in human resources and management at the College of Vocational Studies in New Delhi.
His dalliance with modelling was the cause of the first—and last—major disagreement he had with his conservative family, which associated the profession with a freewheeling sex-and-drugs culture. “But this was one thing I just had to do. So I fought at home and walked the ramp,” he says.
The flirtation with modelling proved short-lived and Rohit returned to his family ideology, which is rooted in a long association with the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an arm of the so-called Sangh Parivar, or family, of Hindu nationalist groups.
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After enrolling in college, he joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose lotus-embossed flag flutters from atop his family house in Preet Vihar, a middle-class neighbourhood in east Delhi.
Rohit was born in a Jat family the day after independence day in 1989, about two years before India wholeheartedly embraced economic reforms by dismantling government controls that had fettered its economy for four decades, and opening itself up for foreign investment and technology.
He was the second of three sons born to Naresh Chaudhary, 47, a builder, and homemaker Manju. The couple named their eldest son Shekhar after Chandrasekhar Azad, the freedom fighter and revolutionary who shot himself to death in 1931 to avoid being taken prisoner by British police.
The second son was named after Rajguru, who together with Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev was hanged in 1931 after the three were convicted of killing a British police officer.
“Rohit was to be named Bhagat Singh, but a relative by the same name had passed away around the time our son was born. So we dropped the idea,” says Chaudhary.
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The three sons were encouraged to be religious in a household that strictly forbade partying. “This Western culture has led to our boys becoming weak. They have lost the courage to deal with life and are taking to drugs. I will not let that happen to my children,” says Chaudhary.