From BJP's 2014 war room to Mamata's inner circle: The quiet rise of I-PAC co-founder Pratik Jain

Kolkata: Buried deep in an old Facebook album lies a photograph dated May 16, 2014, of a faintly smiling young man standing with colleagues beside a triumphant Narendra Modi, the day the BJP-led NDA swept to power, its moment captured in a caption that reads, almost prophetically, "Picture of the year for me."

More than a decade later, that young man, Pratik Jain - the cofounder of I-PAC, stands at the other end of India's political spectrum: the principal strategist of the Trinamool Congress, publicly described by Mamata Banerjee as her party's IT and strategy in-charge, and firmly in the BJP's line of political fire in West Bengal.

Only a few backroom operatives in contemporary Indian politics embody such sharp ideological contrast and such continuity of method.

Those who work closely with Jain say patience is not a slogan for him but a political instrument: a way of outlasting crises, waiting out public anger, allowing narratives to burn themselves out. That instinct, they add, was forged long before he entered Bengal's political bloodstream.

In 2013, as the BJP prepared to project Modi as its prime ministerial face, Jain was part of the core backroom team led by Prashant Kishor. Then a little-known data and communications specialist, he earned a reputation among insiders not just for electoral arithmetic but for behavioural reading, how leaders appeared on camera, how anger travelled through television screens, how impatience could undo weeks of messaging.

Jain has never spoken publicly about those days. He rarely speaks publicly about anything.

What is known is that he belonged to the inner circle that helped shape BJP's 2014 campaign persona -- controlled, restrained, disciplined -- at a time when optics mattered as much as oratory.

Born in Jharkhand, Jain entered IIT Bombay in 2008, graduating with a BTech in metallurgical engineering and material science. His early career was far removed from politics: a stint as a trainee in a private bank, followed by work as a data analyst with a multinational company from 2012.

Politics, for Jain, came through process rather than ideology.

In 2013, he founded Citizens for Accountable Governance, a data-driven initiative that soon merged into what would become the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC). After Modi became the prime minister, Jain co-founded I-PAC, emerging quietly as its operational brain -- less visible than its public face Kishor, but no less central.

His entry into West Bengal was cautious. Over the past six years, he has become indispensable.

From scripting the TMC's digital and ground narrative in the 2021 Assembly elections to steering its messaging through the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Jain has been the party's unseen constant. Maps of India and West Bengal line his office walls; booth-level data, demographics and leader assessments are committed to memory.

When Kishor later moved on to chart his own political course, the transition inside I-PAC was seamless.

Jain's remit today goes well beyond elections into governance messaging, scheme prioritisation, campaign aesthetics and candidate shortlisting.

Within both the party and the government, he functions as a bridge. That proximity has also made him a target.

Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has repeatedly accused Jain of running a "shadow system" within the Trinamool, training much of his political fire on I-PAC whenever political temperatures rise.

On Thursday, when Enforcement Directorate teams searched Jain's Loudon Street residence and his Salt Lake office in connection with an old coal-linked money laundering case, the political stakes escalated instantly. Banerjee herself appeared at the sites, an unmistakable signal of trust.

Despite his influence, Jain avoids the spotlight. Credit is routinely passed on to colleagues. He maintains no visible faction within the TMC, no personal coterie.

That temperament surfaced recently in an unusually reflective LinkedIn post, where Jain wrote about resisting the urge to "optimise" even rest.

"We've glorified productivity so much," he wrote, "that taking a break feels like losing." Rest, he argued, was not a hack but a reminder "that you're human, not a machine." Those who work with him see the same philosophy at play in politics -- knowing when not to act, when to let noise settle, when to allow exhaustion to overtake outrage. "You can't speed-run recovery," he wrote. "You can't optimise your way out of exhaustion." In an era of loud consultants and louder claims, Jain's power lies in his silence. The Facebook photograph from 2014 remains frozen in time, a reminder of where he began.

Today, as Bengal heads towards another high-stakes Assembly election, the strategist who once helped script the BJP's rise is practising patience once again -- this time at the heart of Mamata Banerjee's political machine.

By the end of another long, politically charged day, those who know him well say Jain is likely to return to the same private mantra that has followed him across ideologies and elections: "Patience is the key".