Lok Sabha 2019: Meet the movers and shapers of Indian politics
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 workhorse. 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
