MOVERS AND SHAPERS
They have access and appeal beyond their own parties and are the crucial go-between people in this season of electoral alliances. Meet the movers and shapers of Indian politics
The men and women who make the political wheels turn behind the scenes
On a December morning in 2016, Dimple Yadav, Lok Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Party (SP) and wife of former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, received a call from Aditi Singh, the Congress MLA from Rae Bareli. Singh had a special request for her friend Dimple—Priyanka Gandhi Vadra wanted to meet her. Dimple happily agreed and later introduced Priyanka to not only Akhilesh but SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. A month later, the SP and the Congress announced their alliance for the 2017 assembly election— a deal that fructified primarily through the efforts of Priyanka and Dimple.
Cut to the 2019 Lok Sabha election. While the SP has tied up with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), officially discarding the Congress, Dimple and Priyanka—now the Congress general secretary in charge of eastern UP—met again in Lucknow earlier this month. The two are working to strategically position their contests to minimise electoral damage to their respective parties.
With the Lok Sabha election just a couple of months away, there’s not a dull day for the movers and shapers of Indian politics, as they work overtime to formulate strategies, gauge the public mood, fill in their central leadership with critical data and information and fine-tune the battle plan for the do-or-die seats. They could be the most visible faces of their parties or staunch loyalists or reclusive backroom operators. But what all of them have in common is the ability to break logjams and reach out to leaders across parties, walk the extra mile to strike a hard bargain. They have the courage to take unconventional paths and have proven track records of delivering.
In the BJP, Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar is one such work-
horse. While party president Amit Shah, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray have been the faces of the renewed alliance between the two parties, it was Javadekar who worked behind the scenes to sweeten the deal for the estranged allies. He was appointed the BJP’s negotiator with the Shiv Sena because he had experience of dealing with Sena leaders, from his days as late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan’s right-hand man.
In the course of two months, Javadekar held five meetings with Thackeray and Subhash Desai, a senior Sena minister in Maharashtra, before Fadnavis joined the negotiations. To avoid media attention, Javadekar travelled to Thackeray’s Mumbai home, Matoshree, in a private vehicle. One of Thackeray’s main grudges had been that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah were out of bounds. With the Sena brass reluctant to deal with the BJP at the state leadership level alone, Fadnavis had convinced Shah to pay Thackeray a personal visit at his Mumbai home in June last year. Shah got a sense that Thackeray preferred a dialogue with a senior BJP leader and not the 48-year-old Fadnavis and put Javadekar on the job. “Javadekar keeps a low profile. His easygoing approach and past equation helped nurse bruised egos,” says a BJP leader.
Javadekar’s bigger challenge, though, is to maximise the BJP’s gains in Karnataka, where it failed to form the government last year despite emerging as the single largest party. The BJP would like to see the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) pre-poll alliance falter as it threatens to reduce the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha tally of 17. As the party’s poll in-charge in Karna-
taka, Javadekar’s challenge will be to earn the confidence of JD(S) patriarch H.D. Deve Gowda and chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy.
The BJP, though, has made some invisible breaches down south. The party’s national secretary Ram Madhav has opened channels with YSR Congress (YSRC) chief Jaganmohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief K. Chandrashekar Rao in Telangana. The BJP is a marginal player in both states. Through Reddy and Rao have categorically said no to any pre-poll alliance, the BJP is believed to be pursuing them for assurances of support in the event it falls short of a majority after the Lok Sabha election.
Acouple of circumstantial developments helped the BJP. Election strategist Prashant Kishor, who played a key role in Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha election strategy in 2014 and later parted ways, has joined the party’s ally Janata Dal (United) as the de facto no. 2. Kishor’s organisation I-PAC, or the Indian Political Action Committee, has been preparing the YSRC’s election strategy for the past three years and he was recently roped in by the Shiv Sena too. It is believed Kishor’s meeting with Thackeray on February 5 provided a much-needed boost to the BJP-Sena alliance. Thackeray’s son Aditya arranged the meeting and Kishor explained to the father-son duo how the arithmetic worked in favour of the alliance.
The shaper of the BJP’s pre-poll alliance with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu is Union minister for railways Piyush Goyal. As the party’s poll in-charge in the state, Goyal started out with a few handicaps. He did not have any past equation with the AIADMK leaders. Language was another barrier, but the Tamilspeaking Union minister of state for finance Pon Radhakrishnan helped
Goyal out. Together, they impressed upon Tamil Nadu chief minister E.K. Palaniswami and his deputy O. Panneerselvam that to return to power in Tamil Nadu in 2021, the AIADMK would do well to have the backing of the central government in terms of budgetary support for sops. Moreover, with the CongressDMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) alliance going strong, there would be no place for the AIADMK in a Congress-led government at the Centre. What adds more value to the deal brokered by Goyal is the addition of the Paattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) in the mega alliance. It is expected to boost the alliance’s prospects in northern Tamil Nadu as well as the western and southern districts. The PMK was earlier toying with the idea of joining the CongressDMK coalition.
However, the BJP has multiple worries in the crucial state of UP (80 Lok Sabha seats) and in West Bengal (42 seats). In UP, the SP-BSP alliance threatens to significantly reduce the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha tally of 71 seats. The BJP’s key man here is organisation secretary Sunil Bansal, who is busy mapping each constituency to pick winnable candidates against the emerging Opposition forces—the SP-BSP alliance, which will target backward and Dalit votes and the Congress, which may dent the BJP’s upper caste vote share. Back channel negotiations are also on—Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has been working his phone with BSP second-in-command Satish Mishra to persuade Mayawati to walk out of the alliance with the SP. Congress insiders claim Mayawati’s opposition to the inclusion of their party in
the SP-BSP alliance was instigated by the ‘veiled threat of CBI investigations’ against the BSP supremo.
In West Bengal, the BJP faces challenges from two fronts—the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress-CPI(M) alliance. Contrary to Shah’s target of 23 Lok Sabha seats, internal surveys indicate 8-15 seats, at best, for the BJP. Apart from running a high-decibel campaign led by Modi and Shah, the BJP has been trying to poach strong candidates from rival parties. While Mukul Roy, once a trusted lieutenant of Mamata Banerjee, has emerged as a key player in the BJP’s game plan for West Bengal, Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan engineered TMC MP Saumitra Khan’s switchover to the BJP in January.
If the BJP’s movers and shapers are working the electoral chessboard, the Congress and other parties are also trying to get their permutations and combinations right. In the Congress, Ahmed Patel is burning the midnight oil. Late into the night, the Congress treasurer either works his phone or holds meetings with party leaders at his 23, Willingdon Crescent Road residence in New Delhi. For many opposition leaders, Patel is the preferred point of contact in the Congress. Mamata Banerjee regularly keeps in touch with Patel even though she has direct access to Sonia Gandhi. Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu is more comfortable dealing with Patel, despite his equation with Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
However, of late, Patel, a veteran Gandhi family loyalist, has faced disappointment from two prospective allies. Despite maintaining an excellent rapport with Mayawati, he has failed to convince her to team up with the Congress in recent elections. In the December assembly election,