Meet The Man Behind Nitish Kumar's Bihar Vijay And Narendra Modi's 2014 Landslide Victory, Prashant Kishor

For Prashant Kishor, the man who is credited with making Narendra Modi a political brand, the efforts he put in during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections did not just brighten the image of his then subject. He has himself become a brand too, in political strategy consulting.

newskeek

The former United Nations health official, once the Man Friday of Modi, is currently playing the election strategist simultaneously on two continents. People associated with Kishor say he is getting more such offers, but is very choosy about picking them.

In Bihar, he is managing the campaign of CM Nitish Kumar against Modi and BJP. In Tanzania, where elections just got over, Kishor-founded Indian People's Action Committee (IPAC) provided consultancy services to the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party.

A team from the policy advocacy group was stationed in the African country to advise the ruling party on campaigning. Clearly, the world has noticed the skills of the man who had devised the key facets of Modi's Lok Sabha campaign, including the voter interaction programme of 'Chai pe Charcha'.

Siddharth Walia of IPAC, who is part of the Tanzania project, said his team can talk about the work only after the results of the elections are declared. Both parliamentary and presidential elections in Tanzania took place on October 25 in the mainland and the results are expected soon.

Sources close to Kishor said he had travelled to Tanzania in August along with a team of strategists, who are providing high-level advisory services to the ruling party. Kishor, before he joined the then chief minister Modi's office in Gujarat as a strategist, had worked as a health worker in African countries, including Tanzania, apart from heading a UN aid mission in Chad.What made him take up the Tanzania contract was the understanding of the continent, said a person who knows about the projects IPAC is handling.

"The IPAC team is providing high-level consulting to CCM on methods to approach elections and other strategies," said the person. "It is a senior advisory role that looks at methods that make democracy work in a country like Tanzania, apart from ground-level campaigning which happens here. It is a notch above what happens in India."

Other factors in picking the Tanzania project include the relative political stability in that country and the fact that it is Englishspeaking, the person said. The group is trying to understand the methods of political consultancy and election management that work in countries like Tanzania, at a time when India is trying to strengthen its relations with Africa and is hosting the India-Africa summit in Delhi.

Kishor refused to comment for the report. Kishor had brought together a group of graduates from India's premier institutes and multinational companies to work on Modi's 2014 election campaign under the name 'Citizens for Accountable Governance'. He dissolved CAG a few months after the elections and set up IPAC.

(Originally published in The Economic Times)