Jagan's Long March

The YSRC Chief’s spectacular triumph may generate overwhelming expectations

- Amarnath K. Menon

He has been waiting a decade for this. After his father, then Congress chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), was killed in a helicopter crash on September 2, 2009, Jaganmohan had laid claim to being his successor. He and his family even refused to vacate the official residence for three months as a tug of war played out in the party. But then Congress president Sonia Gandhi refused him, even denied Jagan, as the people call him, the state party chief ’s post, which some in the party had suggested as a compromise. Finally, he called it quits and floated the Yuvajana Shramika Rythu Congress (YSRC) party. Now, 10 years later, the story has come full circle—the Congress party has almost been wiped out in Andhra Pradesh, and Jagan is in the hot seat.

In getting here, Jagan banked heavily on the saturation coverage strategy practised by YSR when he was chief minister (2004-2009). In reaching out to less privileged families all over the state with one welfare scheme or the other, YSR built up an image as a compassionate leader. Jagan’s repeated refrain during his mass contact programmes has been how he would back the state to the time of “Rajanna rajyam (Rajasekhara’s reign)”. Like his father’s statewide yatra in 2004, Jagan did a record-breaking 3,648 km walkathon (the Praja Sankalpa yatra) in 341 days in 2018-19, meeting over 10 million people. All this while he was also reporting to the special CBI court in Hyderabad every Friday, where he is fighting dozens of ‘quid pro quo’ cases involving corporates, friends and bureaucrats. But in the final reckoning, it was all worth it. The YSRC has almost wiped out the opposition, bagging 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats and 151 of the 175 assembly constituencies.