Amlendu Bhushan Khan
New Delhi : Prashant Kishor is back. The man behind the success of Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) in Bihar will manage the joint election campaign of the Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. Prashant Kishor single-handedly made the strategy which defeated BJP in Bihar and ended up projecting Nitish Kumar in a way which BJP couldn’t match during the assembly elections. Prashant Kishor was also involved in negotiations with Samajwadi Party with a close aide of Priyanka Gandhi. The earlier part of the discussion with SP was held by Priyanka’s aide in RGF and in end the discussions were taken up by Prashant Kishor who concluded the alliance talks with SP.
Sources confirmed that in next one week a new tagline for Uttar Pradesh elections would be announced by the team of Prashant Kishor. Earlier senior leaders of the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh had ganged up against Prashant Kishor who had to shift all his attention to Punjab.
But with the alliance in place the wiz kid is back despite the fact that his new and radical communication strategy is anathema to the old guard. Prashant Kishor was the one who gave the famous tagline of ‘27 saal UP behal’ campaign which subsequently got junked because of national compulsions.
Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Leader of Opposition and Congress in-charge of Uttar Pradesh also made it clear when he said that the alliance was stuck to keep BJP at bay in UP.
Now Kishorwill have to work up a different campaign theme taking on BSP and BJP simultaneously. Prashant Kishorduring Lok Sabha elections had worked for the Narendra Modi’s election campaign. He was the brain behind the famous Chai for Charcha campaign. Kishore’s style is to focus on the candidate and eliminate others from the political narrative and only time will tell if it works in Uttar Pradesh.
Samajwadi Party and Congress forged an alliance to jointly contest all the 403 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, insisting it was done to prevent “communal BJP” from coming to power. The ruling Samajwadi Party will contest 298 of the state’s 403 seats leaving the rest 105 for Congress.
“For unity and integrity of India and following secular ideology, we will continue our fight under SP National president Akhilesh Yadav,” state Samajwadi Party chief Naresh Uttam told a press conference addressed jointly with UP PCC president Raj Babbar.
“The country’s secular fabric will become stronger when Akhilesh Yadav becomes the chief minister again,” Uttam said. He said the idea was to “uproot communal BJP” and make UP a leading state by removing both BJP and Mayawati’s BSP. The PCC chief said Congress has accepted SP’s offer of 105 seats keeping in mind the prevailing situation in the country and also the atmosphere in the state.
