Rahul by Gandhi Jatin & Sandhu Veenu

Author:Gandhi, Jatin & Sandhu, Veenu [Gandhi, Jatin & Sandhu, Veenu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670084807
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

Of course, Digvijaya Singh would repeat these assertions at different fora, including the Congress Party’s plenary sessions. He said this as early as mid-2005, and changes in the Congress seem to have followed this pattern. Digvijaya remains among Rahul’s closest advisers from the Congress old guard, while Kanishka has, over the years, emerged as his closest confidant outside the Gandhi family.

Kanishka Singh’s proximity to Rahul allows him to get his ideas across more often than not. He also prepares Rahul’s daily schedule and clears appointments. ‘He is Rahul’s Man Friday,’ revealed a source from within the set-up, ‘the real shadow, who goes with him everywhere and sits next to him in the aircraft on all official trips.’ To get through to Rahul, you have to go through Kanishka. He is equally at ease in Hindi and English, and he is the man who screens the leader’s office mail and gets in touch with those who need to be contacted. The list can sometimes include chief ministers and corporate heads.

When Akhilesh Das, Rajya Sabha MP and former minister of state for steel, quit the Congress in May 2008 to join Mayawati, he blamed the ‘coterie around Rahul Gandhi’ in his letter to Sonia. The disgruntled Das went on to allege that Kanishka Singh’s father was appointed Rajasthan governor despite being close to the BJP because of his proximity to the Congress’s generation next.

The team’s management wonk, Sachin Rao, is closer to his boss in age. He was in the software solutions business before getting an MBA from the Michigan Business School in corporate strategy and international business. A project with management guru C.K. Prahalad turned Rao’s interest towards poverty and the possibility of looking at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP)—the vast base of India’s socio-economic structure—as a viable opportunity that has been ignored. After a couple of farm sector projects with multinationals, he joined the Centre for Civil Society in Delhi. Soon, he was spotted by Rahul, whose own exploration of the ‘real’ India—visiting Dalit homes in Amethi and hauling bricks along with labourers in Rajasthan—drew lessons from Rao’s experience in understanding poverty.

In the Congress organization, there are many others on whom Rahul relies. Congress secretaries Jitendra Singh and Meenakshi Natarajan, both Rahul’s age, have worked closely with him in overseeing the affairs of the IYC and the NSUI, respectively. Jitendra, a royal from Alwar in Rajasthan, studied engineering in Germany, and was twice elected as Congress MLA from Alwar before joining the team. He is now the party’s Lok Sabha MP from Alwar and, since July 2011, a junior minister in the crucial ministry of home affairs. Rahul ensured that both Jitendra and Meenakshi got tickets for the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, as he did for Tanwar and Manicka Tagore, who are also part of the 12 Tughlaq Lane clique.

Tanwar came to the Lok Sabha by winning the election from Sirsa, the home ground of former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala. Tagore is a school-teacher’s son who

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