Why this movement began
I came home to build. I lost what I built. Then I saw the real reason why.
I was a middle-class kid in Delhi who believed, with everything I had, that I would build something for this country. That I wouldn't leave it, the way everyone said I should. That I'd build it here, in this soil, at home. I'm not a leader or a big name. Just the first person to put my name on this: Member #1. And this is the most honest thing I've written: how I lost what I built, and why I gave the rest of my life to fixing the one thing that quietly breaks thousands like me.
I wanted to build it here
I went to IIT Delhi to learn how to build. I thought it would be the summit: the sharpest minds in the country, all in one place. Instead I watched almost every one of them, the most brilliant people I have ever known, pour all of that talent into a single goal: landing a safe job. Even at the very top of the country, almost no one was building anything new. That was the first crack in the dream.
Then Stanford, and the easy path was right there: stay, earn in dollars, send a photo home every Diwali. Almost everyone I knew took it. Two years later, I booked a one-way ticket back. I didn't want to love this country from a distance. I wanted to build it with my own hands, at home.
So I did. I started a company here and poured everything into it: my savings, my sleep, three years of my life. And then I watched it die. Not because the idea was wrong, or the team, or the people who trusted us, but because here, the system does not reward the ones who build. It rewards the ones who wait. The night it ended, I sat alone with one question I couldn't shake: what did I do wrong?
Then I stopped blaming myself
It took me a long time to stop blaming myself, because the truth was so much bigger than me. My company didn't fail. It was failed. By the same wall that thousands of Indian founders crash into every single day. The same wall that pushes our best minds out of this country, year after year. And that wall has a name all of us are afraid to say out loud: politics.
The people who run this country are not our most capable, and that is no accident. We never even get to choose the best. Every election we're handed a list and told: pick the least bad. A country with this much talent and hunger, run by whoever disappoints us a little less than the other one. That is the quiet grief underneath everything else that's broken.
So I made a decision I will not walk back. Not another company, a party. Not a product, politics itself. Everything a startup could never be: every decision in the open, every rupee on the record, every promise on a board where you can hold me to it. If the wall is political, I will not spend my life finding clever ways around it. I will spend it bringing the wall down: one brick at a time, in the open, with you.
- 01I will not build a "high command."
- 02I will not take a single decision in a closed room.
- 03I will put a public account of every rupee in front of you.
- 04And if I fail, I will write "fail" on my own report card, and begin the search for the person who takes my place.
India's biggest problem was never money, talent, or effort. We have all of that. The problem is political, so the answer has to be political too. That is why this party is Bharat Banao: this country is worth building again, and it will be built by the people who refuse to leave it.
If you have ever tried to build something here, a business, a career, a better life, and felt that same wall push back, then this was never only my fight. It is yours too. And the sooner you're in it, the stronger we are.
Our manifesto, in two parts