Prashant Kishor back in BJP
Poll strategist Prashant Kishor is back in Bharatiya Janata Party with a bang recruiting youths and renting out offices in Delhi and around for his new firm IPAC to advise PM Narendra Modi once again in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
He is credited with assisting Modi in the Gujarat Assembly campaign in 2012 and again in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, but he fell out with BJP President Amit Shah in 2014 to venture out to offer his marketing expertise to Janata Dal (U) of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in the Bihar elections and then to the Congress in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh and tying up with Jagan Mohan Reddy to help his YSR Congress oust Telugu Desam Party (TDP) from power in Andhra Pradesh.
Post-2014, Kishor had reportedly fallen out with Shah who refused him a plump post he sought in the party and persuaded even Modi not to offer him a post with the minister of state status in the PMO. Reports suggest that Shah even sabotaged Kishor's proposal to set up a specialist policy outfit to counsel the Prime Minister on development.
His "ghar wapsi" in BJP has, however, created a suspicion in the minds of political commentators that he may be BJP's mole intruding into rival parties after planting stories in media about his fallout with the BJP.
Even now he has spread the word that his relationship with BJP would be transactional only till the 2019 elections.
Most of his team of some 200 persons picked up from the premier institutes and multinational companies for his Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) to build
Modi as a brand in 2014 left him on ideological grounds as they were suspected to be RSS men who were not prepared to promote any non-BJP party. Many of them are already part of a score of different teams formed by the BJP, some 40 of them in a body set up by BJP general secretary Ram Madhav. The BJP thus have Kishor's past teammates to work for the party in the 2019 elections but insiders say it was PM Modi who insisted on getting him back to resurrect youth support as he did in 2014. Over the past few months, Kishor is reported to have held many meetings with Modi, some lasting longer than their scheduled duration, and then followed up by visiting BJP President Amit Shah at his home. Asked if Shah and Kishor have buried the hatchet, a BJP insider said: "It is PM Modi who takes the decisions and nobody will defy him if he asks anybody in the party to work with Kishor. If the two had refused to work together forever, they would not have been having lunch and dinner together on many occasions."