After Trump, next stop Hong Kong for this Indian data wizard?
An accidental immigrant, and a political junkie with the natural touch for data analytics helped Donald Trump win the presidency, and he is just getting started
For a FRESH US immigrant yet to earn the right to vote, Avinash Iragavarapu hasn’t done too badly for himself this election. Not least because he helped put in office a man who ran on an anti-immigrant ticket.
The executive director of the Republican Party in Arizona, 31-year-old Iragavarapu landed in the US just two years ago from India as a tourist. His breathtaking rise in the GOP is one of the most phenomenal – and curious – success stories in American politics today, arcing a political trajectory almost as audacious as his leader, the more famous outsider who has just moved into the White House.
Iragavarapu’s story began in a small town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. An engineer with a management degree, his heart was never in engineering or business. Politics was all he cared for. His grandfather being a politician, Iragavarapu has been campaigning since he was 10. “The heady buzz of political activity at home left a deep imprint on me. My obsession with politics only grew with time; everything else seemed so flat in comparison,” he says.
A management degree gave him the tools of clinical analysis, helping him marry his passion with the cold logic of business. As he entered his working life, he started applying the tools of studying consumer behaviour to understand the voter mood. “There’s so much noise – media, ruling party, opposition parties, social media, civil society activists – how do you hear what the voter is saying and get your message across to him in this din? You can do that only through a strategy based on empirical research rather than emotion.”
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Iragavarapu began to undertake field trips to “understand the operational background of politics”, as he puts it. He also started frequenting television studios as a member of the audience in talk shows and panel discussions featuring politicians in the hope of making acquaintance with some of them. One such interaction led him to the son of a powerful politician who broke away from the Congress party after his father’s death and floated his own party. Before long, Iragavarapu was leading a team of 150 researchers, studying individual constituencies, determining the most resonant issues and demands, screening candidates and shaping the campaign. The party emerged as the main opposition in the state, quite a feat for a new political outfit.