The Trinamool Congress (TMC) is heaving to become a pan-Indian national Party. It has left its footprints in the small state of Goa and is trying to wend its way to other states too using the poll-winning- strategies of Prashant Kishor and his team at I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee) formed by a bunch of young professionals from IIT Kanpur and Bombay and the National Law Institute University, Bhopal. I-PAC’s tagline says, “We have established ourselves as a pioneering platform of choice for professionals to enter the political sphere and meaningfully contribute to the space. We would like I-PAC to transform into an institution for young leaders to partake in grassroots politics and have a strengthening and positive impact on the democracy of our nation.” Prashant Kishor is known as the kingmaker after having catapulted Narendra Modi to the post of prime minister. He works with the Congress’s Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi and with Mamata Banerjee to heighten their strong points and minimize the weaker ones. I-PAC believes in ground research and the I-PAC team sends out its researchers to different states to capture the political sentiments and nuances of each state; peoples’ responses/reactions vis-a-vis their government and its governance model; their political choices etc. It’s basically feeling the political pulse in each state and feeding that back to the larger team to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each political party in a particular state. This is as scientific as it can get.
It’s expected that an I-PAC researcher would also be traversing the electoral path during the Meghalaya bye-election, especially since word had got around that former CLP leader, Mukul Sangma was hobnobbing with the TMC bigwigs and that he could jump ship because the Congress High Command did not have the courtesy to consult him while appointing the Meghalaya Pradesh Chief. Mukul Sangma did manage to create a ripple and to generate enough heat and dust for the Congress High Command to take notice and work out a rapprochement between him and the Congress Chief Vincent Pala. For now, the two Congress leaders seem to have buried the hatchet so the TMC story goes out of the window. But the real question is whether the people of Meghalaya will accept a political party that was birthed in Bengal. As of now the TMC is highly unlikely to find space in Meghalaya, however hard it may jostle for that space. We would like I-PAC to transform into an institution for young leaders to partake in grassroots politics and have a strengthening and positive impact on the democracy of our nation.