Jagan ropes in PK with an eye to win Andhra

The Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy led YSR Congress party has roped in election strategist Prashant Kishor’s Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) to help the party to come to power in Andhra Pradesh, where Assembly election is due in May 2019.

This will be the first foray of PK, who had played the role of election strategist for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in the recently held Assembly elections, into southern politics. Before joining hands with the Congress on the prodding of party vice president Rahul Gandhi, PK had helped Nitish Kumar in Bihar in the 2015 Assembly polls and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general elections.

PK, who was the man behind slogans like “Ab Ki baar Modi Sarkar” and “Bihar mein bahar ho, phir se Nitish Kumar ho”, will also be devising strategies to mould public opinion in favour of Jagan. Sources familiar with the development said that the team of PK, which was active in UP and Punjab, reached Hyderabad last month, where they were engaged in collecting and collating initial election related data including voting patterns which will be used by them to devise an election strategy for Jaganmohan Reddy, Congress’s archrival. YSR Congress, with 67 MLAs in the 175-member Assembly, is the main opposition party in the state.

PK, who has the reputation of charging princely sums for rendering his services, according to sources, is now focusing more on working with regional parties as they “give the freedom that is required to execute the strategies on the ground”. While filing his nomination for Lok Sabha bypolls in 2011, Jagan had declared his personal assets at Rs 365 crore.

As this newspaper had reported earlier, the I-PAC feels that it was not able to work with complete freedom in UP because there were too many “senior leaders” within the Congress who refused to work as per the plans devised by I-PAC. “It is very difficult to handle the egos of leaders of big parties. They do not follow the directions as a result of which we had a bad experience in UP and Punjab. Our intent now is to work with regional parties and advise them accordingly,” a source familiar with the development said.