Sridhar Pabbisetty (left) during his election campaign at RT Nagar, Bengaluru
After years of work on policy thinking, Sridhar Pabbisetty wanted to go beyond just ideas. The quest for putting political action to his ideas led him to quit his job as the chief operating officer (COO) of the Centre for Public Policy (CPP), Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B) and contest the 2013 Karnataka assembly elections from the Hebbal constituency on a Loksatta Party (LP) ticket. While he could not win the seat, by his own admission, the experience taught him a lot. “My electoral experience has taught me about the challenges that Indians face at the moment. My biggest takeaway is that I have identified the kind of work I want to do, how to take it ahead is what I have to think about,” says Mr Pabbisetty.
During his two-months-long campaign, he put in about 16-20 hours daily with his three-member team and volunteer group. Having extensively campaigned on a bicycle, he reached out to a cross section of people across the society ranging from vegetable vendors, tempowallahs to housewives discussing their problems. Since Hebbal has many public parks, he used them as contact points for meeting ordinary people and discussing their peeves.
“One of my volunteers went to a daily-wage labourer to speak about my candidature. The labourer asked, why should I vote for him when he is not giving us biryani and liquor. My volunteer then replied, do you want one-time biryani or life-time biryani? The one-time vs life-time biryani argument became quite popular during the campaign,” he laughed as he recalled his campaign days.
“When we went to the field, our task was to simplify issues affecting the voters. We would ask simple questions pertaining to education, for example, to make them understand how privatisation of this area was making life difficult for them. To reach out to the common man, it was necessary that he understood how policies in every sphere affected him. There was this instance when a watermelon vendor whom I had spoken to earlier said that he will vote for me. When a journalist who was there to interview me at the time asked him the reason, he said that I was the first candidate who had come and spoken to him on such a personal level. This simplified narrative and personal touch was essential to reach out to a cross-section of the people. Our core focus was on education and skill development for the youth,” he described.
Pabbisetty put in his papers at IIM-B as late as March 28, 2013, a hair’s width away from the Karnataka assembly elections in May. Attributing the blink-and-miss duration of the campaign as one of the reasons for his defeat, he said, “Voter outreach is the toughest thing in politics. I knew I would be underprepared but it was a conscious decision. Having said that, there is never a right time to enter politics. As politician Kanshi Ram (founder of Bahujan Samaj Party) had once said, the first election you fight to lose but get popular, second you fight to defeat someone and third to win.”
The former boss of the IIM-B think-tank hopes that his candidature will inspire more like him to enter politics. But with political lineage, money power and rogue behaviour being the passport to contemporary politics, do urban youngsters stand a chance? Pabbisetty believes that education and financial freedom are the only way in. “If a youngster wants to enter politics, good education is the key. It helps build perspective as well as keeps you grounded. It is also important to work for a few years but you should have the well-rounded experience of travelling the country and speaking to a lot of people across different categories. My experience over the past five years helped me connect to the voters from the marginalised sections more easily and I could easily get into conversations which mattered most to them. However, some amount of economic freedom is also necessary. If you have an education loan on your head, entering politics is a bad idea. So, get a little bit of economic cushion and then jump into it,” advises Pabbisetty, who has also completed a PGSEM from IIM-B.
There are three ways he could go from here now, he says. His first wish is to rejoin IIM-B doing exactly what he was at the CPP, about which he says he is in informal discussions. If IIM-B does not give, he could be working fulltime in politics building the Loksatta Party further in Karnataka. On his mind also is founding Hebbal Labs, a ‘political observatory’ of sorts which will offer electioneering advice to political candidates.
This, however, was not his first tryst with politics. He was associated with Association for Democratic Reforms and worked as coordinator for Karnataka at National Election Watch in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. He has also been significantly involved with Sakaala, or Karnataka Guarantee of Services to Citizens System, which became an Act in 2012 has won accolades even from Google. He has also set up opengovernanceindia.org to make governance and developmental data easily accessible to users. It aims to build a unique and collaborative community of government data enthusiasts.
He expects the new K Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka to deliver good governance. “Siddaramaiah is a very capable leader and did a very good job when he was the finance minister of the state. With all the recent corruption scandals, the state is at its lowest ebb and he should now aim to take it higher,” he concluded.