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For over three days in the second week of June, nearly a hundred men and women sat through exhaustive lectures at a coaching institute on the outskirts of Mumbai. Their teachers were political leaders, academicians, bureaucrats, legal and accounting experts. Most of these students had spent several unsung years in the state units of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its youth wing. Adept at slogan-shouting and organising protest marches, these students were now political assistants to BJP lawmakers and trying to come to grips with the complexities of governance atop Raisina Hill.
The location of this training workshop was Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, an institute spread across a seven-hectare plot at Bhayendar, in the Thane district of Maharashtra. As part of the institute's certificate course for political assistance, the students learnt roles and responsibilities of a personal assistant, the history of BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), history of BJP in governance, brief history of other political parties, parliamentary procedures, parliamentary tools, publicity and image building, general alertness, responsiveness, office management and documentation.
The BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) run the institute, possibly the only one of its kind in South Asia, to conduct training workshops for its cadres, even MPs and ministers. BJP Vice-President Vinay Sahasrabuddhe heads the institute and claims they have coached not just BJP and RSS workers, but also those from the Nationalist Congress Party, Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. "We are not shy of our ideology but are very professional in our approach," he says.
In recent months, the institute has focused more on schooling political assistants of ministers and MPs, a move spurred by one of the first decisions of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-headed Cabinet, after it was sworn in on May 26 last year, that prohibited its ministers from employing people in their personal staff who had worked with ministers of the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime.
But to find their replacements was easier said than done. The BJP asked ministers to look at young and bright men and women from among its youth and students wings - the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). The Prime Minister's Office even asked non-BJP leaders like Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ramvilas Paswan to not go further than this new crop of party workers to appoint to his personal staff. Each Cabinet minister can appoint as many as 15 people in his personal staff. However, few had any experience of working in the government.
This is where the Prabodhini stepped in to conduct coaching classes in the fine art of political assistantship. The institute, at a nominal cost of Rs 5,000, held a week-long certificate course to train political assistants of ministers in August 2014. It followed it up with a three-day course on June 12, 13 and 14 for aides of BJP MPs on the nuances of utilising the Rs 5 crore of local area development funds (MPLAD) that each MP receives.
The Sangh believes the training to be a crucial aspect of these assistants to prevent embarrassing situations like when the assistant of a minister consigned the portrait of an "old bald man", gifted by a BJP worker for the minister, to a dusty corner of his room, little realising that it depicted Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee. But training has become important also because the party has been meticulous in placing people from the Sangh Parivar as aides to ministers, some of whom might one day follow in the footsteps of an L K Advani or Amit Shah.
Advani earned his political stripes as an aide to the then first-time MP Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1957 while current BJP President Amit Shah was an aide to BJP's Gujarat leader Shankersinh Vaghela in the mid-1990s. Then there are other examples of how several contemporary political leaders learnt the ropes as political assistants to the leaders of the 1960s and 70s.
Former CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat earned his spurs as an aide to party stalwart A K Gopalan. Then there were the likes of Telugu Desam Party's P Upendra, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha after the 1984 elections, who started as an aide of socialist leader Madhu Dandavate or the case of former Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit having worked in the office of Indira Gandhi. Then there were those who didn't join active politics but played a key backroom role like Advani's aide Deepak Chopra and Vajpayee's Shiv Prakash.
Many in the current set, like Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu's Officer on Special Duty Y Satya Kumar, have their own hopes of taking up a political career after having spent years in the BJP, ABVP or BJYM. He and other such assistants like Abhishek Chaudhary, an aide to Delhi BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi, say the course helped them significantly in understanding parliamentary procedures.
Sahasrabuddhe says the stress of the training to personal assistants is to instill in them that politics is not a dhandha or business. "Politics is thought to be the last shelter of scoundrels. We need to change that by training, and across the political spectrum, particularly as democracies are facing a challenge because the delivery or performance quotient of the political class is very low," he says.
The website of the Prabodhini states that personal assistants "have the ability to make or mar the political prospects of a leader". An aide of a politician has to be silent, unassuming but at the same time smart and assertive wherever required. The aides need to enjoy fullest confidence of the leader with whom they work. "But aides do not have to pass any qualifying exams. At most the government requirement is a graduate. This is where the Prabodhini comes in," it states.
The course, which involves experts from different fields, also covers aspects of media relations, constituency linkages and computer skills. Communications skills taught include "conversational, phone and English language skills. The course on MPLAD funds asked the aides to pay heed to the needs of the MP's constituents.
The Prabodhini, named after RSS leader Rambhau Mhalgi, was started as a research and publishing division of Sangh-related literature in 1982. It was late Pramod Mahajan who took a keen interest to expand its activities, and Sahasrabuddhe built on this after Mahajan passed away.
The Prabodhini also runs training courses for teachers, environmental reporters and has an exchange programme with Washington DC-based International Republican Institute. In April, it held a 'Hindutva Adhyayan certificate course' that was addressed by RSS leaders like Ratan Sharda. According to its website, the course, among other things, discussed "the role of communists, Christians and Muslims in pre-and post-independent India".
In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the institute organised BJP vistarak, or expansion training programmes, for those not directly associated with the BJP "but with immense faith in Modi's leadership". One such course hosted 135 professionals from Maharashtra's Sangli district, a Congress-dominated area. Its objective was "to bring a large number of people in the network of BJP through this programme who would not have thought so explicitly about BJP as the first preference for voting in the election".
The institute conducts nearly 20 training programmes, including those for the private sector, in a year, and trains nearly 2,000 people. The institute boasts of a 30-room guest house, a swimming pool, gymnasium and even a helipad.
