Kolkata: What can a career chartered accountant, an academic and a Bachelors degree holder in Business Administration possibly have in common? Little— one may be tempted to say. However, interestingly, what binds these three disparate professionals into one thematic cohesion is the role they have played for their respective political parties in the recently-concluded state elections in India, results for which were declared last Thursday.
While bigwigs belonging to all the major political parties in the fray hogged much of the limelight in the run-up to the polls, Result Day brought these three seemingly unconnected individuals into the national limelight perhaps like never before as they quietly delivered the goods for their respective parties in the polls.
Meet Raghav Chadha of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Anupriya Patel of Apna Dal and Viswajit Rane of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who are now political celebrities in their own right. Gulf News takes a closer look at these ‘Gen-X’ politicians with low-key public statures but high-octane political deliverance.
Raghav Chadha, 33, MLA (AAP):
“In the coming days, Aam Aadmi Party will become a national force ... the party will emerge as the national and natural replacement of Congress.” These were the exact words of a young Delhi MLA while addressing a motley group of party workers at a rented accommodation of the party’s chief ministerial candidate, Bhagwant Mann, in the Sangrur district of Punjab during the recent state elections.
One might wonder what was an MLA from Delhi’s Rajendra Nagar doing in Punjab? Well, meet Raghav Chadha, all of 33, who was AAP’s election coordinator for Punjab – a state that the Arvind Kejriwal-led party won by such a sweeping majority that some television anchors in India pointed out that it was just not the broom (AAP’s election symbol), but an entire vacuum cleaner that had been unleashed in one fell swoop!
And much of the credit for the stupendous AAP victory goes to this young, suave, energetic man who dug his heels deep during campaigning and made up for any perceived lack of political experience with oodles of mass contact and enthusiasm. If there was an unmistakable element of freshness about the entire AAP campaign in Punjab this time, then it was because of Chadha who helmed the AAP campaign machinery.
Chadha, who graduated from University of Delhi, pursued Chartered Accountancy from the Institute of Chartered Accounts of India and thereafter attended London School of Economics for a certification course in EMBA. There is no doubt that though Mann was the party’s unanimous choice as the chief ministerial face, it was this career chartered accountant who lent credibility and dollops of self-belief to a campaign that heavily banked on ringing in a positive change in a state that had traditionally sided with political megastars since Independence.
After successfully delivering ‘Mission Punjab’, Chadha’s stakes are bound to go up in AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal’s playbook. What remains to be seen is whether Chadha remains confined to Delhi alone or will he now be Kejriwal’s right-hand man in Gujarat as well, which goes to the polls later this year. Keep watching!
Anupriya Patel, 40, MP, Apna Dal:
The sitting federal Minister of State for Commerce and Industry is the daughter of Sone Lal Patel, the founder of Apna Dal (Sone Lal). A graduate from Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College for Women, who later went on to do her post-graduation from Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University, Patel first hit the national headlines when she won the Mirzapur Lok Sabha seat in UP as an ally of the BJP in the 2014 General Elections.
Soon after BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, there was much talk about Apna Dal merging into the BJP. However, this double Masters degree holder in Psychology and Business Administration held her own and firmly resisted such a move. Patel, who has been the party president since her father’s death in 2009, has managed to carve out a niche for herself and her party, despite the fact that Apna Dal is just a minor ally in a combine led by a behemoth called BJP.
In an election where even the Congress managed to win just two seats, Apna Dal won 12 of the 17 seats it contested in alliance with BJP. Lion’s share of the credit for that goes to Patel, who has very effectively steered her unit through the twists and turns of coalition politics in a high-stakes state such as UP.
Over the years, Patel, a former faculty member at Amity University, has very successfully achieved two crucial political brownie points: As a smaller alliance partner, she has shown loads of common sense to keep her channels of communication and cooperation with the BJP intact, while at the same time not allowing her gigantic alliance partner to gobble up a minor ally’s appeal and relevance as an independent political entity at the hustings.
The result is that today, even the BJP cannot afford to treat Apna Dal as a mere pushover. In the months ahead, it will certainly not be surprising if Patel rises even higher in stature in UP politics and in the corridors of power in Delhi. Given her party’s showing in the UP elections this time, Patel’s bargaining chip for seat sharing with the BJP for the 2024 General Elections will surely go up.
Viswajit Rane, 50, MLA, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
His meeting with the Goa governor on Saturday set the rumour mills on an overdrive. The big question was: Will he stake his claim to chief ministership after one of the most closely-contested elections that any state in India has seen in recent memory? Terming it as a “personal meeting” of a “disciplined BJP soldier”, Rane brushed off all speculation for the time being. However, there is no denying the fact that he will surely be one of the foremost names on the list of contenders for the CM post as and when the BJP top-brass in Delhi gets into a huddle to select the next chief minister of Goa.
Rane, the Minister of Industries, Trade and Commerce in Goa, is the son of former Goa CM Pratapsingh Raoji Rane. While his age obviously does not qualify him as a “young Turk” among key Goa politicians, what is working heavily in his favour at the moment is his support base among the youth in the state. Added to that is the fact that the sitting Goa Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, managed to retain the Sanquelim seat by the skin of the teeth — just 650 votes. In comparison, Rane won by a margin of 8,085 votes from Valpoi. His wife Deviya, too, won from the Poriem seat.
A graduate from the T.A. Pai Management Institute in Goa, Rane made his debut in politics with the Congress party, but switched over to the BJP in 2017 — a move that fetched him a lot of political dividends as he was made a minister in the state Cabinet led the then CM Manohar Parrikar. From thereon, Rane has not looked back and his 2022 election win by a very decent margin has catapulted him to being one of the frontrunners for even bigger roles in Goa politics in the days ahead.
Since Parrikar’s elevation as a Cabinet minister in the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre and his untimely demise in 2019, Goa BJP has been grafting for a hardcore, seasoned politician as the party’s 24x7 face in the state. With Rane’s stellar show in 2022, that search could finally be over. END
