
On a sunny afternoon last October, Aishwarya Salgaonkar, president of the Shiv Sena Goa’s womens’ wing, got a phone call from an unknown number.
The person on the other end identified himself as Jatin and said he was a member of the Indian Political Action Committee, or IPAC – a political consultancy run by Prashant Kishor. According to Salgaonkar, this “Jatin” said he got her number from a local WhatsApp group and wanted to know if she was interested in joining the Trinamool Congress.