"Main jeetunga! (I will win.) I have confidence that I will win because victory is possible in the circumstances," says Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the man who aims to become the next President of India.
In an exclusive interview to
rediff.com, Vice President Shekhawat said: "
Janabhavna mere saath hai (feelings of the people are with me)."
Shekhawat, who has seen it all and done it all in his political career spanning six decades, is composed and calculative just weeks before the election to the nation's high office.
The 84 year old veteran says age is no bar for him to do anything. He had fought and won his first election in 1952.
In the last six decades, he has been a police constable, a farmer, he has won elections 17 times to become either a legislator or parliamentarian and has been chief minister thrice before becoming Vice President. He has contested and won Rajasthan assembly elections 14 times.
From the Vice President's official residence on Maulana Azad Road in Delhi, he is set to post a challenge to the United Progressive Alliance-Left presidential nominee Pratibha Patil who is already on the defensive because of the charges levelled against her regarding her previous association with a co-operative bank in Maharashtra.
When asked if the presidential contest had become quite controversial this time because of the 'mudslinging', as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described it, Shekhawat takes a pause and says, "I have fought 20 to 25 elections. In elections such things happen."
When asked if the dignity of the Presidency and of the election itself had been eroded by the politics being played before out, he said, "Why did the controversy rake up? Why is the decorum of the event being affected? You should ponder
over it. I need not comment over it because everything is coming in the papers."