Ahmedabad: Even as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal and the newly-elected Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann are poised to hold a “massive rally” in Ahmedabad on April 2, the party has appointed its key backroom boy in Punjab, IIT-Delhi professor Sandeep Pathak as the Gujarat affairs in-charge.
After its huge Punjab win where the party decimated all the top political dispensations worth their name, Kejriwal had announced that Gujarat is one of its priority states that goes to the polls at the end of 2022.
Among the five who filed Rajya Sabha nominations from the AAP on Monday, Pathak spent three years quietly working in the background with the AAP riding roughshod over one and all with 92 out of 117 seats.
The AAP chief and Punjab Chief Minister’s roadshow, which the party claims would be bigger than that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 11, has been organised through the city’s labour-dominated areas being called “mini-Saurashtra” with a large Patel population and huge presence of the Dalits.
The roadshow concludes at the Khodiyar Temple in Nikol, which is the deity of the Leuva Patel community that played a major role in the Congress’ impressive performance in the 2017 assembly elections.
The new Gujarat affairs in-charge, Pathak, holds a Ph.D. from the prestigious Cambridge University, and is said to be the key backroom boy behind the AAP’s huge success in Punjab.
