 "Prashant Kishor: Poll star")
Many in the Congress believe the Assembly elections in Punjab early next year are a do or die battle for the party. Despite losing the election last time, the party polled nearly 41 per cent votes here. And, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance is up against 10 years of anti-incumbency. Yet, the Congress high command, desperate for a win, has chosen not to trust old warhorse and its chief ministerial face, Captain Amarinder Singh, entirely with managing his own campaign. The maverick Singh has to depend on another maverick: Prashant Kishor.
For a comatose party that ruled Uttar Pradesh in another millennium - the Congress's reign in UP ended in December 1989 - a win in the state is next to impossible. Yet, it is a mix of India's oldest party's desperation and the image that Kishor has built for himself that has led Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi to believe that his party can win in UP.
So, despite a high-stakes job as advisor to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and another full-time assignment as Singh's campaign manager in Punjab, Kishor is busy trying to script the Congress's comeback in India's most populous and political state.
That the high command has given him unbridled autonomy is clear from the way he recently threw up Rahul and his sister, Priyanka Gandhi's, names for the party's chief ministerial candidate. Kishor, who likens himself to a doctor, has prescribed that the party should tap into its traditional vote base, the Brahmins who form 10 per cent of the state's population and who have, over the years, drifted away. He wants a Brahmin face from outside UP to be projected as chief minister. Among the names that fit the description are Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, and Delhi's former chief minister Sheila Dikshit. People close to him say when he was asked if it could be one of these three, he just shrugged and replied, "Maybe," triggering controversy and all kinds of speculation.
Kishor does not deal with other Congress leaders and takes his orders directly from Rahul Gandhi. At 39, he exudes the confidence of a man who has only wins, big ones under his belt.
Kishor's rise from an anonymous man working as a social sector policy advisor to Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, is the stuff stories are made of.
In 2012, when they started working together in Gandhinagar, Modi was also in the process of learning and devising his strategy, says Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. Modi, he adds, has always had a great fascination for anything to do with technology. "Along with Pramod Mahajan, he was among the very early takers of technology." Kishor, with his penchant for wedding politics with technology, fitted in perfectly with the IT team he had in Gandhinagar.
As the 2014 Lok Sabha election neared, various elements came in for Modi's campaign. Among them were the NRI Hindutva supporters and an army of dynamic, young professionals. By now, Kishor was in Modi's inner circle, having won his trust to the extent that he was living and operating out of his house. The growing army of Modi's professional supporters, now organised as "Citizen for Accountable Governance", or CAG, found an astute advisor and team leader in Kishor.
As he started his search for those who would help him in his mission for Modi, one of the people he reached out to was Sandeep Goyal, chairman of Mogae Media who is writing his PhD thesis on human brands. Kishor flew down from Ahmedabad to Mumbai to see him. They met for about two-and-a-half hours during which he encouraged Goyal to speak more and more. "He just listened. He was very intense and incredibly bright," says Goyal. Kishor's ability to get a political leader to give him a mandate that is clean and clear is in itself a quality, he adds. "Most of the times political parties don't even know what their mandate is. He clearly had 100 per cent of Modi's trust." Goyal declined to work on the campaign because of a non-compete agreement with his earlier joint-venture partners, Dentsu. "I regret it to this day," he recently wrote in an article.
Without a warning, Modi, meanwhile, brought in Amit Shah. Suddenly, Kishor found that there was a buffer between him and Modi. "Maybe that soured the relationship," says Mukhopadhyay. The story goes that expecting a role for himself when Modi became prime minister, Kishor asked him, "After May, what?" And Shah replied: "After May, June."
Snubbed, Kishor left. "But what did he leave when he had never joined anything?" scornfully asks Vani Tripathi, BJP's former national secretary. His was just one of the many people working on Modi's campaign, party leaders say. The BJP would like to disown him. But Kishor believes, and is known to have said in private conversations, that Modi's journey from a successful politician to an unbeatable political force is his doing.
The Aam Aadmi Party, one of Congress' biggest rivals in Punjab, hates his guts. "How will Kishor resolve the infighting in Punjab Congress?" challenges Sucha Singh Chhotepur, AAP's Punjab convenor.
No one, however, dismisses the work he did in Bihar, mastering Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar's winning campaign that installed the Mahagathbandhan, or the Grand Alliance of Janata Dal United-Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress, decisively interrupting the Modi juggernaut.
CAG, meanwhile, disintegrated and in its place came up Indian-Political Action Committee, or I-PAC, which looks at itself as a politically agnostic startup that does election campaigns across political parties. Kishor, who does not care much for such definitions, does not have any stake in it. I-PAC has three directors and Kishor is involved with it in an advisory capacity even though he is the critical link between I-PAC's team of professionals, aged between 26 and 28, and the political leadership.
"If we work for 14 hours a day, PK (as Kishor is referred to) clocks 18," says an I-PAC member. JD (U) member Pavan Varma, through whom Kishor first met Kumar, says there were days he would not go home to sleep and yet be fresh and alert.
The way he remembers the name of every village, the constituency it falls in and its key problems, one would think he has an excel sheet in his head, says an I-PAC member. "Yet, he is able to collate all data and express it in the simple words of the people." He is known to pay heed to advice he gets from even the most junior foot soldier. "He knows the names of each team member and makes it a point to call if one of them is ill or has a personal problem," he says. "Each one of us wants to be like him."
In Bihar, when Kumar and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad were toying with the idea of joining forces, there came a point when the two almost fell out. Prasad did not want Kumar to be projected as the chief ministerial candidate and went off to meet Rahul Gandhi. Overnight, posters came up in Bihar with Kumar's face and this message, "Aage badhta rahe Bihar, phir ek baar Nitish Kumar." This, says Santosh Singh, author of Ruled or Misruled: Story and Destiny of Bihar, was Kishor's doing to put pressure on Prasad. "He had clearly anticipated something like this and was ready with a game-plan," says Singh.
Some say that Bihar was more of Prasad's victory than Kumar's. "Yes, it was Prasad's return from oblivion," says Singh. "But then, he has always had a strong vote base (Yadavs form 16-17 per cent of the state's population), while Kumar's Kurmi caste is only 3.8 per cent of the state. So, Kumar clearly had to work harder."
After the Bihar victory there was talk of a Rajya Sabha seat for Kishor. He did not ask for it; he also did not say "no". But that would have tied him down to one party. Instead, as advisor to Kumar, the first ever, he was appointed cabinet-rank counsel to Bihar Vikas Mission, a powerful parallel secretariat that will oversee the implementation of Kumar's seven-point agenda of ensuring power, water, toilets, roads, and so on, across the state. "It's a smart move. This way, Kumar also get to keep an eye on all departments, including those under Prasad's sons (one is Bihar's deputy chief minister and the other health minister), through Kishor," says Singh. This also leaves Kishor free to follow his passion for strategising campaigns.
One of Kishor's USPs is the way he moulds himself to work successfully with mercurial personalities of contrasting nature. Each time, he changes himself, striking a chord with them at a personal level.
He is accused of running a presidential form of election, but his argument is that Indian elections have always been personality driven, right from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.
But if democracy can be subverted or its course altered simply through some effective slogan management, data crunching and amplification of the political message, then is it really democracy? In his defence, Kishor says people relate to the political narrative, not to the gimmickry, and his job is to simply communicate the political narrative that a certain political party or entity stands for.
It might not always work, however. Many feel what Kishor has started is a passing fad. "You have got to have a good formula, a good product," says Mukhopadhyay. "Modi was a good product, Kumar was a good product. Amarinder Singh is probably a good product. But is the Congress a good product in UP even with Priyanka Gandhi, if she comes in? I am not very sure."
Kishor has told his team that the day he loses the next election, he will quit. And that he is certain that after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he will not be doing this anymore. It has taken a toll on his health. He is sleep deprived, weighs 8 kg more than he did when he started and he has a family, a son who is six, in Delhi who will need him around more.
When they ask him what he will do after 2019, he replies: "I don't know what I will do tomorrow."
