Newsmaker | Pawan Khera: The backroom boy who embraced limelight as voice of Congress

It was in the 1980s that Khera began his political life in Udaipur, as a Youth Congress activist. Last year, he put up on his social media accounts a photograph of him standing next to Rajiv Gandhi during the latter’s visit to Udaipur on May 1, 1991, for campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections.

Gandhi was assassinated three weeks later. Khera took a back seat from politics for some years and emerged again in August 1998, when he joined Dikshit who was preparing to lead the Congress in elections in the national capital as the president of the Delhi Congress.

After Dikshit won an impressive victory in the Capital, then considered a BJP stronghold, she asked Khera to join her as an officer on special duty, looking after media and political affairs. Khera joined Dikshit’s office in December of that year, and their partnership lasted all through the 15 years that Dikshit remained the Delhi CM.

Khera remained by Dikshit’s side even after she found herself sidelined in the party following the Commonwealth Game allegations, and the target of the Aam Aadmi Party’s anti-corruption campaign.

Around 2018, Khera emerged as the television face of the Congress, and brought much-needed aggression to the grand old party’s narrative. As a panelist in media interactions, he defended the Congress vigorously, gave his BJP counterparts as good as he got, and also engaged with them on social media.

In 2018, then Congress president Rahul Gandhi promoted Khera to national spokesperson. Soon, he was also made convenor of the Publicity Committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Since then, Khera has not looked back, and has come to be much valued by Congress sympathisers for his aggressive takedowns of the BJP, and for his punches and counter-punches.

However, the 53-year-old has also had his share of disappointments. In May last year, Khera was among those Congress leaders who hoped to get a Rajya Sabha berth. When the party overlooked him, his disappointment showed in a cryptic tweet: “Shayad meri tapasya mein kuch kami reh gayi (perhaps there was something deficient in my hard work)”.

A month later, the Congress appointed him Chairman of the Media & Publicity Department.