On the 11th floor of a building in east Kolkata, 100 to 120 employees sit with laptops on blue-teal-white desks. Two large TV monitors beam news in Bangla and English throughout the day. This is where I-PAC, arguably the most potent weapon in the Trinamool’s arsenal after chief minister Mamata Banerjee herself, works from.
India’s largest cross-party political advisory group has been working with the ruling party in Bengal for the last six years and ensured that the Trinamool’s electoral juggernaut rolls on.
I-PAC does everything that Mamata Banerjee has been doing on her own since she formed the party, and then came to power in Bengal. I-PAC makes it easier for her. Suggesting campaign themes and forms, vetting candidates, and sometimes doing the “dirty work” for the Trinamool, specially when the party lands in a soup, I-PAC is everywhere and also miles ahead of the competitors. In private, even a section of the BJP admits that they are good.
“Trinamool runs on abeg [emotions]; I-PAC has brought about a structure, a system,” a senior minister in the Mamata Banerjee government told The Telegraph Online.
Mukul Roy, the then all-India general secretary of the Trinamool, used to draw up the election strategy till the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. It had worked to the extent that Bengal was among the few states where the Narendra Modi wave did not reach in 2014, the year that marked a tectonic shift in Indian politics.
Two years after that election, Mamata had her first meeting with I-PAC’s founder, Prashant Kishor, at the Trinamool Bhawan in a January evening.
Three more years later, with the Trinamool suffering electoral reversals in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP believed it was inching closer to win Bengal.
Prashant Kishor and I-PAC formally entered Bengal’s politics holding the hands of Abhishek Banerjee and Trinamool in June 2019. The state’s political-scape has not been the same since then.
Kishor had announced that the BJP would not cross double figures in the 2021 Bengal Assembly elections. It didn’t.
Kishor had even moved to Kolkata and set up base in the same house on the Kalighat street where Abhishek once lived.
Ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls, the BJP pushed a narrative of the Trinamool being a sinking ship with leaders deserting the party and facing high anti-incumbency.
I-PAC and the Trinamool offered a “new” Trinamool to the people. Social welfare schemes were rolled out, government outreach was extended to the doorsteps through Duare Sarkar, Paray Samadhan and Didi ke Bolo, flagship schemes like Swasthya Sathi and the announcement of Lakshmir Bhandar dole for the women of Bengal.
The counter-narrative worked. The Trinamool bagged 215 seats. The BJP could manage only 77.
Since then, I-PAC has been the not so secret weapon of Mamata Banerjee.
The agency operates strictly away from the arclights. They did not want the office’s location named for this article, even though it is available on Google.
I-PAC in Bengal has anywhere between 200 and 300 employees engaged with the various teams that operate all over the state. Some of them collect “political intelligence”, set up the day’s narrative on social and mainstream media. Then there are the yatras, the meetings, the campaigns, liaison with the media on a regular basis.
“They are very format-driven,” said a Trinamool MLA whose district has a four-member team from I-PAC. “For everything, they have a set questionnaire which they send to us. I have to give the answers. Based on my inputs, they send the feedback to the party leadership. It could be about a problem in the area, or a candidate that I have nominated.”
They visit the areas and take the feedback from the people on problems they face and which could have an impact on polling. A solution is offered to the party, conveyed to the local leadership.
Right now, I-PAC is working on training modules for the Trinamool workers targeted at the voter list revision, one of the key talking points for the party in the run-up to next year’s Assembly election.
Ahead of the Assembly polls, a block level organisational reshuffle is on the cards and I-PAC is working on the ground-level surveys.
Following the exit of Kishor from I-PAC, the organisation is led by three directors: Pratik Jain, Vinesh Chandel and Rishi Raj Singh.
Jain, 35, is the pointman between the organisation and the Trinamool. He was the one who had predicted the party would improve its performance in last year’s Lok Sabha polls, while many others felt the BJP would bag the most number of Bengal’s seats.
Trinamool insiders describe Jain as soft-spoken and accessible. “MPs, MLAs and any functionary can reach out to him,” said a Trinamool source.
I-PAC’s journey with Trinamool hasn’t been smooth for either the organisation or the party. Several senior leaders have complained in public about the advisors calling the shots in the party.
When candidates for the 2021 Kolkata Municipal Corporation polls were being decided, Trinamool leaders in front of Mamata had disagreed with the names suggested by the organisation, many of them from the second generation of Trinamool leaders.
Mamata herself called some of the sitting councillors whose names were not in the list and asked them if they wanted to contest or not. That included mayor Firhad Hakim who was present at the closed-door meeting.
“Look, we are not the party,” said an I-PAC source. “We do not decide. We make suggestions, recommendations, we pitch ideas for campaigns. The final decision rests with the party.”
For both the Trinamool and the I-PAC, the next test is the 2026 Assembly election. Fake voters in electoral rolls, the branding of Bengali-speaking people in BJP-ruled states as Bangladeshis, the law and order situation in the BJP-ruled states are issues that Mamata has flagged. Behind the scenes, I-PAC has been working to get the statistics, monitor developments in those states and set the narrative.
Because narratives win elections. And no one in Bengal knows it better than Mamata Banerjee. I-PAC is what helps her sell the narrative in a convincing manner over her political opponents.