Who is AAP’s new national general secretary Sandeep Pathak?

A former IIT-Delhi professor, 43-year-old Pathak, a Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab, is a key-aide of Arvind Kejriwal and crucial strategist in AAP’s nationwide expansion plan. As AAP created the position of a national general secretary (organisation), Pathak seems to have appeared as a natural choice.
When the Anna Hazare-led India Against Corruption Movement was taking shape in 2011, a large number of professionals from various fields – engineers, doctors, teachers, social workers and lawyers among others – came in touch with Arvind Kejriwal, who was one of the main lieutenants of Hazare. One of them was Sandeep Pathak, who had recently completed his PhD in the field of physics from University of Cambridge.
Kejriwal set up the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2012, and as the political party eventually contested elections, many of those professionals went on to become MLAs and known faces – such as Dilip Pandey and Saurabh Bhardwaj, who are engineers, minister Satyendar Jain, who is an architect, Somnath Bharti, a lawyer, and more.
Pathak, however, chose to remain away from electoral politics as he went to Oxford for postdoctoral research and eventually joined the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in 2016 as an assistant professor in the department of energy science and engineering. But, since 2017, Pathak has been a key strategist for AAP – both on and off election seasons, from Delhi to Punjab and Gujarat.
The AAP, which continues with its pursuit of expanding footprints across states, created the position of a national general secretary (organisation) on Tuesday. Pathak, who is now a Rajya Sabha MP for the party from Punjab, was chosen for the role.
Being the national general secretary (organisation) of one of the three political parties in the country which has government in two or more states, 43-year-old Pathak joins the league of B L Santhosh of the BJP and K C Venugopal of Congress.
So far, AAP had a national convener (Kejriwal), national secretary (Pankaj Gupta) and national treasurer (N D Gupta). This is for the first time it created the post of a national general secretary (organisation), senior party leaders said, even as Pathak’s exact spot in the hierarchy remains slightly unclear at this point.
Pathak, on Tuesday, was also appointed a permanent invitee to the AAP’s 11-member political affairs committee – the party’s top decision-making body chaired by Kejriwal.
A close aide of Kejriwal who prefers operating in the shadows, Pathak quit his job at IIT-Delhi in 2020. He was one of the main strategists for AAP in the 2020 Delhi election and polls in Punjab and Gujarat this year.
While the party stood victorious in Delhi and Punjab with thumping majority and, several party insiders say, the Rajya Sabha ticket for Pathak was nothing short of a reward, AAP faced drubbing in the recently held Gujarat polls in which it won only five seats out of 181 it contested.
Next year, AAP is looking forward to contesting assembly polls in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Telangana and Chhattisgarh. And, according to party insiders, Pathak will continue being a key strategist in all these polls.
“He (Pathak) has a distinct working style which comes from his experience in the field work and research,” said a senior Delhi-based AAP leader. “He usually invests at least two years in a state in which he does multiple surveys and aggressively invests in organisation-building and expanding support base. These are activities that happen much before election campaigns begin.”
Born in a family of farmers in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur, Pathak keeps his family life low-key even within the party, an AAP functionary said. He happens to be one of the main strategists behind AAP’s “Delhi model” of governance which has been the party’s central plank for expansion.
In the new role, Pathak is expected to continue doing the same, as AAP spreads its wings across several states. Kejriwal, pretty much elaborated it in a tweet: “I congratulate Dr Sandeep Pathak and wish him good luck for his new responsibility. We have to build AAP sangthan in every nook and corner of the country.”