Am Not Prashant Kishor, He Said, Then Blogged Warning About Strategists

Guwahati: On a day when he's being toasted for the BJP's exhaustive sweep of Assam, Rajat Sethi has offered several disclaimers in a blog.

"Over the past two years, media seem to have attributed far too much credence to poll strategists," the 30-year-old writes, asking for a toning down of "media frenzy" and urging a recognition of the party workers in Assam whose "thousands of ideas were at play in full fruition" in the campaign that ended in such resounding success.

Mr Sethi, who returned to India last year after studying public policy at Harvard's famous Kennedy School, moved to Guwahati last year to advocate the BJP to the youth through social media. He partnered with Shubhrastha, 28, who worked on the BJP's general election campaign in 2014 with Prashant Kishor.

To not read his blog as a comment against Mr Kishor would require giving Mr Sethi considerable benefit of the doubt - and he certainly does not appear to seek it.
 "I am no Prashant Kishor, these are terms the media uses," he told NDTV this morning. Mr Kishor, 37, was an integral strategist of the BJP's general election campaign in 2014; for the state election in Bihar last year, he worked against the BJP, teaming successfully with Nitish Kumar, who was re-elected; currently, it is the Congress who is his client in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

Mr Sethi, on the other hand, is not politically agnostic. "I helped the BJP because I find ideological similarities with them," he said, while his blog cautions against over-valuing the "one time dashboard of professional data crunchers".

With Assam, the BJP gets its first government in the seven Northeastern states, proving its appeal extends well beyond its traditional heartland. The Congress, whose Tarun Gogoi headed Assam for 15 years, won just 26 of 126 seats. The BJP and its allies collected 86.