BLUEPRINT FOR THE OPPOSITION
For an accidental political strategist, Prashant Kishor has an impressive track record. He has advised leaders across the political spectrum, from Narendra Modi to Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, Rahul Gandhi, M.K. Stalin, Jagan Mohan Reddy, Arvind Kejriwal and Captain Amarinder Singh. Of the nine election campaigns that he has helped strategise, eight resulted in victory. The latest being the May 2021 assembly election in West Bengal where Mamata Banerjee won a landslide to be re-elected chief minister for a third stint despite the BJP throwing everything it had in the game. As well as M.K. Stalin’s win in Tamil Nadu. The only campaign Kishor lost was an effort to get the Congress to win the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election.
The 44-year-old former UN public health specialist stumbled into the hazardous profession of poll advocacy when he met Narendra Modi in 2010 while the latter was the chief minister of Gujarat. What began as advice to the forward-looking chief minister on health issues turned into campaigns for nutrition for the Gujarat government to writing Modi’s speeches. “One thing led to another,” says Kishor, “and I got involved in his political campaign.” He helped Modi in his highly successful re-election campaign in 2012 and then got formally involved in his 2014 campaign to become prime minister.
Kishor formed the Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG), a poll advisory group that at the peak of Modi’s prime ministerial campaign had 1,200 employees working for it across 13 states. Kishor was credited for coming up with Modi’s memorable Chai Pe Charcha campaign. After the victory, Kishor parted ways with Modi and the BJP over differences on the role he was to play. The CAG then morphed into I-PAC or Indian Political Action Committee, a cross-party political advocacy group, that saw Kishor emerge as the country’s premier political advisor. Asserting that he is no longer formally involved with the I-PAC, Kishor says he is busy these days helping build a political formation that can effectively challenge the BJP in the 2024 general election. In an exclusive interview with INDIA TODAY, Kishor spoke for over two hours, laying out the gameplan to mount a credible challenge to the BJP in 2024. Excerpts:
Q. In a recent tweet, you said “the idea and space the Congress represents is vital to a strong Opposition. But Congress leadership is not the divine right of an individual, especially when the party has lost more than 90 per cent of the elections in the last 10 years. Let the Opposition leadership be declared democratically”. Clearly, you are attacking the Congress leadership and not the party. What prompted you to do so?
The idea is not to attack anyone. The whole debate recently is whether an effective Opposition means one with or without the Congress. In my tweet, I am very clear that the idea and space the Congress represents is vital for an effective Opposition in this country. But the Congress party, the idea, or the space it represents, is not the same as the Congress in its present formation. Under the present leadership, the Congress has not done very well. In the past 10 years, in the more than 50 elections, both state and general, it has lost almost 90 per cent, except the 2012 Karnataka state polls, the 2017 election in Punjab and the 2018 elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. It tells us that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the Congress has organised itself in the present context, the way it approaches elections, the way it engages with people.
