Poll strategist Prashant Kishor — or PK as he is known — may have ruffled many feathers in the upper echelons of the Congress leadership, but on the ground in Uttar Pradesh, where the party has been out of power for 27 years, he is seen as a harbinger of hope.
In Rae Bareli, which, along with neighbouring Amethi, is seen as the party’s last citadel in the State, Dinesh Singh, the solitary Congress member in the Legislative Council, explains why: “PK’s management is better than the Congress’s management. He is working to make the party more broad-based. For instance, when he organised a programme for Rahul Gandhi in Lucknow, he didn’t ask a few leaders to bring their supporters — instead, he ensured a minimum of 15 persons from every Assembly segment.”
PK, Mr. Singh says, has ensured that the Congress has entered political conversations across the State, especially in the rural hinterland — and this is not merely because two cavalcades of senior leaders have already barnstormed across the State, even as party vice-president Rahul Gandhi undertook his Kisan Yatra.
Promise of waiver
Rather, the party campaign’s centrepiece addresses the distressed farming community, and is linked to a key slogan, “ Karza maaf, bijli bill half, samarthan mulya ka karo hisab (loans will be waived, electricity bills will be halved, and a reasonable minimum support price will be ensured).”
Thousands of Kisan Mang Patras (farmers’ demand forms) are now being distributed in the villages, with respondents asked to fill in their names, addresses and telephone numbers, along with the loan amount they owe the banks.
Indeed, at the conclusion of his roadshow in Lucknow on September 23, Mr. Gandhi made a sharp focussed speech on agrarian distress in the State, explained what measures the previous Congress-led UPA government had taken and ended with saying that if elected, loans would be waived in 10 days.
“If this had been done through the Congress system,” Mr. Singh says, “these forms would have been only distributed where the party has some support. But PK has ensured that they will reach all 901 blocks and a Sonia Gandhi sticker is stuck on every door.”
Even ticket aspirants utter PK’s name with enthusiasm. In Faizabad’s Rudauli segment, outside the Saidham Mandir at Chitaipur, a group of locals are sitting chatting after a temple feast: among them is Sushil Kumar Trivedi, who has been in the party since 1984. He says, “PK’s people came here and asked aspirants to give names of five people from each booth, and then assessed what kind of support they have.”
Good tidings
In far-flung villages in Bhadohi, Allahabad, Azamgarh and Khalilalbad, villagers had not heard of PK, but they knew about the loan waiver promise. Many even recalled that the Congress had waived loans in 2008 — and so it was a possibility, that they would do it again if voted to power.
Of course, though the Congress is being talked of — more where there is a credible candidate — no one is yet saying it has a chance of winning the election.
But everyone agrees that its vote percentage will increase and that it will get more than the 28 seats it won in 2012. And if it doesn’t help the party in 2017, there will be a party organisation for the battle of 2019, the next Lok Sabha elections, is the consensus.
Even senior Congress leaders who insist that political planning, concept and strategy has been left to them, are reluctantly admitting that PK has made an impact: a former MP tells me: “He is not doing anything that we could not have done — but we were not doing it. There is so much factionalism and rivalry that we needed an outsider to state the obvious and carry it through.”
