Prashant Kishor’s former aide Sunil Kanugolu who worked on BJP’s 2017 UP campaign joins Congress

NEW DELHI: The election strategist who worked on the successful Uttar Pradesh campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) in 2017, Sunil Kanugolu, 40, has joined the Congress party. A senior Congress leader confirmed that Konugulu, who was part of the founding team of the organisation A Billion Minds (AB’M), has now officially joined the All India Congress Committee (AICC) as a member and will a new department of the party.

“As an insider he will work not just on Karnataka but all other elections,” added this person who asked not to be named.

Kanugolu, some in the Congress say, could fill the role the party envisaged for election strategist Prashant Kishor, who mentored the former and made him part of the team that managed Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign.

“He (Kanugolu) was one of the first 200 people who joined Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) and worked with us in 2014,’’ said a person who was part of the team then and who didn’t want to be named. Kishor declined comment. As HT previously reported, Kishor was in talks with the Congress leadership to join the party but the plan fell though in September last year. HT learns that Kanugolu was separately in touch with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi simultaneously. Gandhi was keen on an election strategist who was not a consultant but part of the party.

One of the reasons for the buzz surrounding Kanugolu in the Congress is that he is said to have shared a good rapport with Union home minister and former BJP President Amit Shah, a fact acknowledged by the person from CAG cited above.

The strategist’s most recent assignment was with the Shiromani Akali Dali (SAD) in the Punjab campaign. He worked for All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in the last assembly elections after working with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham (DMK) during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. However his largest body of work is with the BJP — the 2017 Uttarakhand and the 2018 Rajasthan elections.

The sudden entry of an election strategist into the ranks of the party has surprised many in the Congress. The same discomfiture which was there with Kishor for having worked with many other political parties has also surfaced. HT spoke to several leaders in Karnataka and in the central leadership who all refused to speak on record but confirmed that they were aware that Kanugolu was going to be working with the Karnataka team.

The only platform where senior leaders were told of his participation was at a recent meeting between Rahul Gandhi and the party’s Karnataka leaders. “Sunil will work on the campaign and is putting a team together in the state,’’ Gandhi is believed to have told them. Those who are supporting his induction point out that having worked with the Akalis for a year, he has ensured that they are in the reckoning in Punjab. They also point out that he was responsible for the AIADMK putting up a good fight in the last elections in Tamil Nadu, despite losing their leader J Jayalalithaa. And that he delivered an absolute majority for the BJP in UP in 2017.

“It is good that all parties are realizing what we started — that data and social media and strategic planning are very crucial to election campaigns,” said Arvind Gupta, who worked on the BJP’s 2014 campaign and also with ABM.

The Congress is yet to officially respond to a request for comment.