2014: The Election That Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai Page A

mean in practice?
    On one social occasion, Kanishka and I got down to
discussing UP politics. He rattled out impressive statistical data on caste and community equations
in the state, but you could easily sense this was the kind of knowledge that one acquires on the
Internet. He couldn’t, or so I sensed, have intimate knowledge of the local leaders of the
Congress in each district of UP, the kind of personal information that makes a Mayawati or a Mulayam
such a formidable opponent in the state. The roaring, rumbustious subaltern leaders of the Hindi
belt can hardly be combated through an academic grasp of caste combinations.
    The other member of Rahul Gandhi’s A-Team was
Sachin Rao. Like Kanishka, he, too, was foreign educated, having got an MBA in international
business and strategy from the University of Michigan. He was deeply influenced by management guru
C.K. Prahlad’s ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ philosophy. He had returned to India with a
desire to build a culture of ‘social entrepreneurship’, to reach out to those poor and
marginalized sections who needed access to markets and technology. His NGO-like approach to politics
appeared to mirror Rahul Gandhi’s ‘two Indias’ philosophy.
    Interestingly, during this period, Rahul Gandhi also
sought out prominent left-leaning academics as part of his ‘political learning’ process.
Professor Sudha Pai of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), an expert on BSP and UP politics, was one
such academic. Rahul even attended a seminar at JNU on ‘UP in the 1990s: Critical Perspectives
on Politics, Society and Economy’ and invited Prof. Pai to speak to a Congress youth training
camp in Chitrakoot in UP. Dalit Bahujan scholar Kancha Ilaiah, known for his controversial
anti-Brahminical views, was also engaged with. Caste politics in particular had, it seems, captured
Rahul’s imagination.
    Gandhi clearly was looking for intellectual
sustenance to shoreup dwindling political self-confidence. One academic told
me that Rahul would often ask him to suggest books he should be reading. ‘When I gave him a
list, he promptly asked his assistant to get the books as soon as possible,’ the academic
claims.
    Another academic wooed by Rahul was Prof. Yogendra
Yadav of CSDS, best known for his psephology and election analysis on television. ‘I was most
impressed with Rahul when I first met him,’ Yogendra confessed to me once. ‘He came
across as good-hearted and well read.’ Then why did Yogendra eventually not bite the bait and
become part of Rahul’s think tank? ‘I think one eventually realized that for all his
good intentions, he couldn’t really change the system as he was promising. The Congress party
was too set in its ways to change,’ says Yogendra, who in 2013 joined the Aam Aadmi Party
(AAP).
    Yogendra may have stayed away, but Rahul appeared to
find an intellectual mentor in Dr Mohan Gopal, director at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of
Contemporary Studies (RGICS) and a former director at the National Law School in Bangalore. Gopal
joined RGICS in 2011 and began providing Rahul with key inputs on political and constitutional
issues. It is Gopal who is believed to have suggested to Rahul that he should target the ‘Not
Rich, not Middle class, not BPL’ (referred to as NRMB) constituency, sandwiched between
poverty and middle-class incomes. This idea would lead Rahul in the 2014 elections to seek out the
unorganized sector social groups like street vendors, farm labour and daily wage earners as a
potential vote bank (see chapter 8).
    Gopal has an interesting CV. He was one of the
founders of the Congress’s student wing, the NSUI, in the 1970s. He even became president of
the NSUI between 1974 and 1976 before leaving party politics to do a law doctorate at Harvard, then
work for twenty years in legal administration at the World Bank and then head the prestigious
National Law School in Bangalore.
    I met Gopal for this book and asked him to describe
his relationship