Who is Sandeep Pathak? AAP’s Rajya Sabha pick from Punjab is also Kejriwal’s key man in Gujarat

IIT-Delhi professor Sandeep Pathak was among the five who filed Rajya Sabha nominations from the Aam Aadmi Party on Monday. The little-known Pathak has also been appointed as the party’s Gujarat affairs in-charge, where elections are scheduled to be held later this year. 

Sandeep Pathak, a professor of Physics at the premier IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), worked behind the scenes in Punjab for the AAP, helping it build an organisational structure down to the booth level. 

Believed to be a close confidante of Arvind Kejriwal, 42-year-old Pathak was entrusted with the task of designing the party’s outreach in the assembly elections in Punjab. He is credited with the AAP successfully reaching out to the people through its door-to-door campaign.

Pathak hails from a village in Lormi region of Mungeli district in Chhattisgarh and belongs to a farmer family. After his initial schooling in Lormi, he moved Bilaspur for his higher education and then completed his higher education from Hyderabad.

After completing his masters and PhD from Cambridge, UK, in 2011, Pathak joined the faculty of IIT Delhi in 2016. His area of work at the IIT is stated to be fabrication of perovskite-based photovoltaic devices, photo-physical properties and he has a number of research papers to his credit. 

Pathak’s nomination to the Rajya Sabha and being appointed as the in-charge for Gujarat comes as a big jump for the IIT professor as the party is clearly banking on him for its national ambitions. 

The party has already announced that it will contest all the Assembly seats in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. Experts believe that the AAP is trying to emerge as a national alternative to the Congress and is therefore eyeing states where the BJP and the Grand Old Party are involved in a bipolar contest.