Amid alliance talk everywhere, Jagan Mohan Reddy is keeping to himself

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YSR Congress chief Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy | Facebook

Reddy maintains distance from both NDA and opposition alliance

YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) chief Jagan Mohan Reddy seems to have taken a leaf out of Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s book. Amid the political hullabaloo in an election season, when every party is scrambling to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance or be seen with the opposition grouping, Reddy is staying aloof. He has maintained equidistance from both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the grouping of opposition parties.

Reddy’s Twitter handle @ysjagan, created four years ago, reads: Tweets 446, Following 9, Followers 853k. He follows his party — @YSRCParty — his former adviser Prashant Kishor, ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta and TV personalities such as Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai. His party’s Twitter handle @YSRCParty has 324k followers but follows just one person — @ysjagan.

Reddy’s tweets are in a sharp contrast to those by most other politicians as he refrains from personal attacks, confining himself to raising state-specific issues. His party colleagues believe that Reddy’s equidistance strategy is meant to keep his options open after elections.

Denied chief ministership by the Congress after his father Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s death in 2009, Jagan had quit it a year later to float his own party. He was also in jail for 16 months in connection with graft cases. YSRCP leaders say Reddy feels “wronged by the Gandhi family” and this is a good enough reason for the BJP to keep him in good humour and target the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) instead.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, the difference in the voteshare of the YSRCP and the TDP-BJP combine was just around 2 per cent but the latter got 17 Lok Sabha seats as against 8 for the former. With Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and TDP chief N. Chandrababu Naidu in the opposition camp now, the BJP is banking on a much stronger show by the YSRCP this time.

BJP appropriates ‘living monument of UPA’s failures’

Perhaps the biggest U-turn of the Narendra Modi-led government has been its disposition towards Congress’s flagship rural jobs scheme — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The BJP has been a critic of the scheme and PM Modi went as far as to call it a “living monument of the UPA’s failures” in Parliament. However, given how electorally sensitive the issue can be, the BJP gradually decided to adopt and promote the scheme, with increased budgets.

Now with elections due in barely a few months, the BJP seems to have decided to appropriate MGNREGA completely. The government has come out with a long advertisement — being broadcast actively on radio and elsewhere — where it talks of the scheme in glowing terms and lists all that it has done to improve it since 2014.

The advertisement boasts the advantages of the scheme and how the rural poor are benefiting from it. Not just this, party cadre at the ground level have also been told to communicate what the BJP government has done to fix its implementation when campaigning and listing the government’s achievements. Many in the party are wondering whether this reeks of hypocrisy borne out of electoral compulsions or the BJP has really started to see the pluses of MGNREGA.

(Contributors: D.K. Singh and Ruhi Tewari)