Assam elections 2016: The new duo in BJP backroom

By his side was Shubhrastha, 28, who had worked closely with Kishor in Gandhinagar. She was the co-founder of Citizens for Accountable Governance, which helped Modi win the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. She also helped Nitish Kumar in the last Bihar polls.

Elections 2016: Big Winners & Losers

The duo, who co-headed the BJP’s campaign efforts in Assam, say they are “political entrepreneurs” driven by ideology, not “mercenaries”. This, they say, sets them apart from strategist Kishor.

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“I am not driven by market forces but by ideology,” says Sethi.

Shubhrastha, who studied in Delhi’s Miranda House college before joining Kishor, says, “Even if I am offered Rs 10,00 crore, I won’t work for the Congress.”

Sethi, who hails from Kanpur, studied in an RSS-run Shishu Mandir. He pursued B Tech from IIT-Kharagpur, where he says he couldn’t get along with a crowd that spoke only English and played rock music. He wanted to be surrounded by “Indian values”, so he started a Hindi cell on campus.

In the US, he studied at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Kennedy School with a focus on campaign management. He also started an IT company, which he later sold.

Sethi was asked by Madhav to mobilise people in 32 districts, 25,000 booths. At a rented flat in Guwahati, the two set up a “war room”. “Everything we did was at the micro level. Imagine, the BJP had five MLAs, but Amit Shah and Madhav kept saying we can form the next government,” said Sethi.

They also used computer and mobile software to get real-time information on the political landscape in Assam and engaged 400 youths to keep them up-to-date.

“Congress made the mistake of putting up posters of the Godhra train and the victim, Qutubuddin Ansari, to show this is Modi’s Gujarat model. That backfired. Somehow people didn’t connect to the Gujarat riots,” said Sethi.

He said their analysis also suggested that BJP and AGP “lacked chemistry” but “maths forced” Shah to enter an alliance.

The BJP also had other tricks up its sleeve. They used Bhupendra Hazarika’s poems to connect with people, did not target Tarun Gogoi directly, and let Himanta address more rallies than Sonowal.

“We treaded carefully. All new ideas were tested on social media first,” said Sethi. On the party leadership, he said, “Madhav is a task master while Shah is a man of details.”