New Delhi, Oct. 15: Rajat Sethi absorbed lessons on what it takes to be a nice guy in the BJP early on in life, thanks to his ideological anchorage: Keep a low profile and speak if you must because ideally silence is golden.
So try as one might, Sethi refuses to say a word on his prospective new assignment as Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das's adviser. He doesn't even confirm he is taking up the offer.
Sethi's associates said if he did accept the Jharkhand position, he would stay "nearly anonymous" and plunge himself in areas close to his heart: the tribals and de-centralised governance. He would not manage the social media as the buzz was shortly after news of his appointment was put out.
Sethi's "conviction" was that a "secretariat" at the panchayat level must be created and local sarpanches must be fully empowered with a back-up secretariat that enabled them control over their mandate and functions.
Sethi may have caught the media's attention when he worked in the BJP's war room in Guwahati before the Assam elections with general secretary and Assam minder Ram Madhav, but he had been in the state for a year, researching for a book on the alienation of north-east tribals that is likely to be launched in 2017.
Sethi schooled from the RSS's Saraswati Shishu Mandir in Kanpur and then went on to get a BTech from IIT Kharagpur. He went to the US to complete an MBA programme from the MIT Sloan School of Management and then acquired a Master's in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Governance before returning to India.
However, Sethi's associates let on that he admires the Jharkhand chief minister "deeply" because he "rose from the lowest ranks and is rated among India's best chief ministers because he's doing phenomenal work".
Coming from a family of RSS "swayamsevaks" in Kanpur, his associates say, Sethi has always been comfortable in the saffron brotherhood. The self-enforced "discipline" of recognising and accepting one's place in the organisation and political hierarchy was gleaned from his father, who even though a dedicated Sangh volunteer all his life never joined the BJP.
When the BJP swept the elections in Assam, Sethi was placed in the roll of honour with Madhav, Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma, to his "discomfiture", claimed an associate. So concerned was Sethi by the thought of how gratuitous publicity could impact his career early on-he is only 30-that he wrote two articles downplaying his and his team's contributions.
The piece, published in the Huffington Post on May 21, was self-explanatory and precisely set out his position as an "election strategist", a label he's loath to use, a former colleague said.
"Every political worker brings with him a great set of experiences and ideas. In a party of more than 25,00,000 karyakartas in BJP Assam Pradesh, thousands of ideas were at play in full fruition... Who would decide which one was professional and which one was not? " stated Sethi.
Sethi, say associates, had to emphasise the contrast between a data processor and a field worker to discard an image that he was modelling himself on Prashant Kishor, Narendra Modi's backroom boy before the 2014 elections.
Kishor, now employed by Rahul Gandhi to micro-manage the Uttar Pradesh and Punjab polls, had assumed the halo of a legend after Modi's victory.
