On March 11, 2017, Sandeep Pathak, then barely a year old in the party, watched from a distance as Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal huddled with a group of senior leaders at his residence, monitoring the results of the Punjab Assembly elections. Pathak, who had carried out a few surveys for the party in Punjab in the run-up to the polls, had a brief interaction with Kejriwal that day, which was in many ways a prelude to his subsequent meteoric rise through the ranks. Within six years of joining the AAP, Pathak, who had a short stint as an assistant professor at IIT Delhi after completing his PhD on high-temperature superconducting materials from the University of Cambridge, has become one of the most influential leaders in the party. Elected to the Rajya Sabha in April 2022, Pathak was on Tuesday appointed as the National General Secretary (Organisation) of the AAP. He will also be a permanent invitee to the party's highest decision making body, the Political Affairs Committee. The appointment is a clear recognition of Pathak's role in the AAP's victory in Punjab earlier this year and its entry into Gujarat – factors which have earned it the status of a national party. "More importantly, it makes him the most important leader in the party after Kejriwal when it comes to expansion plans," said a senior AAP leader. Notwithstanding Kejriwal's public statement celebrating the AAP's elevation as a national party, there were murmurs that the party leadership was not very enthused about the Gujarat and MCD polls outcome (where the AAP won but with a narrower seat gap than it had wished for). "But the announcement on Pathak shows that the experience gained in Punjab and Gujarat will be invaluable going ahead. The AAP still has a limited pool of leaders with his level of experience and understanding," said the leader. So what is it that Pathak brings to the table that has endeared him to the AAP leadership? "During the Gujarat polls, a picture had gone viral showing Pathak standing quietly behind the crowd at a rally. The man who was instrumental in the party's organisational affairs, including holding mega rallies, was nowhere near the stage. That's Pathak for you," stated an AAP functionary involved in the Gujarat campaign. People close to Pathak say his distancing himself from the limelight is not a conscious strategy adopted by him or by the party but largely a function of his own self-effacing nature. "At least you have a picture of him now. In Punjab, there was not a single picture showing his involvement," noted the functionary. First as the in-charge of Punjab, and then in Gujarat, Pathak "cracked a sanghathan formula", another AAP functionary pointed out. "He can build an organisational structure on the ground from scratch. Although in Gujarat, the presence of leaders from the Patidar quota movement was a major plus, he moulded the structure," said the source. Apart from his hold on data, helped to a large extent by his background as a trained scientist, Pathak's biggest strengths are understanding the demographics, and spotting local political trends and faces. "Put simply, he knows how to find the right people to assign roles to, and to get them to work. He is good at ideating and executing targeted messaging campaigns such as guarantee cards," the source added. While given his relatively short stint in politics, Pathak does not have many detractors within the party, there are some whispers. "His strong academic background means he has an approach that is very demanding, to the extent that he can be a little overbearing. But politics demands a more flexible approach," said an AAP functionary. After joining the AAP in 2016, Pathak, who belongs to a family of landed farmers from Chhattisgarh's Mungeli district, worked initially with the policy arm of the Delhi Dialogue Commission, which was then headed by Ashish Khetan. "It was Khetan who sent him to Punjab for survey work. Later, the leadership found his work impressive and that brief encounter with Kejriwal happened," sources said. Over the next few years, Punjab remained Pathak's primary project. After the AAP's victory there, Gujarat became his next assignment. Pathak was also the AAP's Himachal Pradesh co-incharge, where the party had decided to invest time and resources at one point. But the arrest of Satyendar Jain, who was the election in-charge of the AAP in the state, forced a retreat, and as it redirected its resources to Gujarat, the party's candidates forfeited deposits in most of the seats in Himachal. Going ahead, the AAP is likely to contest the coming civic polls in Mumbai and Bangalore, but it is unlikely to invest the amount of resources it did in Gujarat. Among the states, the party might pick Chhattisgarh, where the Congress is in power, with a considerably weakened BJP in the Opposition, though the party admits that experience shows it performs well against the Congress rather than the BJP. "No concrete decision has been taken as yet, but Pathak will be steering the expansion plans,” a source said.
