During his Mithibai College years, Krishna Hegde won a spate of inter-collegiate fashion shows while dabbling in his family’s garments business. For the son of veteran Congress leader B Sripad Hegde, politics was the next logical step; he started off as a student union leader and has gone all the way to winning the election to the Vile Parle Assembly seat.

In the late 1980s when student activism was the preparatory ground for several of today’s political figures, Hegde was part of the then powerful National Students Union of India around the same time when Raj Thackeray was leading the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena and the BJP’s Vinod Tawde and Parag Alavani were part of the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Still, the 42-year-old seemed like a rank newcomer when he was pitched against stalwarts like Sena’s Vinayak Raut and MNS’s Shirish Parkar in the polls. Hegde believes his victory, though with a slim margin, is not the result of the splitting of Marathi votes, which comprises 46 per cent of the total, between his two rival candidates.

Hegde’s father had managed the election campaign for former deputy chief minister Ramrao Adik, the Congress’s Lok Sabha candidate from Mumbai Northwest before Sunil Dutt’s term. “Since 2001, I have worked very closely with the senior Dutt and later with Priya Dutt as her campaign manager,” said Hegde, adding that gave him the opportunity to connect with the citizens’ groups that represent the largely middle-class voters in the constituency.

Now as an MLA, Hegde has set himself an agenda that includes resolving the water and traffic congestion problems. He also plans to set up citizens’ groups where there are none. “I want to give power to the people so that they keep me under pressure and push me to perform better,” he says.

... contd.