Jagan has created history by winning 151 out of 175 seats in AP Assembly.
Hyderabad: Father’s death, exit from a ruling party, facing a clutch of corruption cases filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), jail term for 17 months and being out of power for 10 years—these things usually would make any politician weak and wither away in public life. However, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, who endured all these ordeals without losing his focus, has achieved his lifetime ambition of becoming Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.
Jagan, 46, who is set to be sworn in as the second Chief Minister of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh on 30 May at a public ground in Vijayawada, has created history of sorts by winning 151 of the 175 seats in Andhra Pradesh Assembly, mainly because of two factors—endurance and credibility in his public life. Of course, he had to wait for close to a decade to achieve his goal.
Few would have trusted him and a very few followed him when he decided to chart out his own course of political life—defying the then formidable Congress high command.
A majority of Congress MLAs had signed a memorandum pledging their support to Jagan as the Chief Minister when his father died in a chopper crash on 1 September 2009. Then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, who visited his family, however, refused to meet the demand and made ageing minister K. Rosaiah the next Chief Minister.
The high command also hadn’t permitted Jagan to take up an “Odarpu Yatra” (offering condolences to the bereaved families of those who had died of shock after YSR’s death). This opened a war of sorts between him, then 37 years old, and the party high command. Jagan not only had decided to go ahead with his Odarpu Yatra, but also leave the Congress.
Many seniors in the party, including his father’s friend and Rajya Sabha member K.V. Ramachandra Rao, had advised him to be silent so that he could be taken as a minister at the Centre and even be considered for the Chief Minister’s post in future. However, Jagan went ahead and quit the party and announced floating a new party, the “Yuvajana Shramika, Rythu (YSR) Congress”, a party of youth, workers and farmers in March 2011.
Since then, there was no looking back to his political journey. He visited close to 700 families across the combined Andhra and vowed to fulfill his father’s promises to the people. In between, the CBI filed a dozen odd corruption cases against him and he won a series of by-elections for his supporting MLAs, who quit the Congress and joined his party.
While the CBI sent him to jail in 2012 for about 17 months, the Congress high command also replaced Rosaiah as Chief Minister with N. Kiran Kumar Reddy to placate the angry Reddy community MLAs, who sided with Jagan. But these things couldn’t reduce his popularity. Jagan was released on bail before the 2014 general elections. Before that, he supported Congress presidential candidate Pranab Mukherjee.
He scored eight out of the total 25 MPs and 67 out of 175 MLAs in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly, on his own, against a formidable combine of TDP and BJP. As an Opposition leader, he again went on a series of political tours across the state and launched a padayatra in November 2017, which he completed in January 2019, covering a distance of around 3,600 km.
Known for his political acumen, Jagan worked out his political strategies well and backed each and every of Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s moves at the Centre. Jagan’s support to BJP’s presidential candidate Ram Nath Kovind and Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and to the government’s moves on demonetisation and GST naturally brought him close to the BJP leadership and the PM.
This was not taken kindly by Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, whose TDP was a constituent of the BJP-led NDA at the Centre. Naidu’s anger against the BJP leadership for not expediting the trial of cases against Jagan and granting him interviews to the PM, resulted in TDP pulling out of the NDA government last May.
Of course, not granting of the special category status to Andhra Pradesh was the official reason given by Naidu for leaving NDA. Meanwhile, Naidu tried his best to weaken Jagan by admitting 21 of his MLAs and a few MPs into TDP. That disn’t affect Jagan’s morale and he decided to boycott the Assembly and move among the public for the last two years.
Jagan also roped in the political strategist and IPAC founder Prashant Kishor and quickly worked out a strategy to win over public confidence. Jagan came up with the “Nava Rathnalu” (nine major promises to different categories of people) two years before the elections, instead of weeks before the elections, in the form of a manifesto, so that they went well with the public. This worked well.
The Nava Ratnalu are Rs 12,500 investment subsidy to all farmers every year from the second year of his coming to power, completion of all irrigation projects, staggered implementation of prohibition, health insurance to all, housing for all, free education to all up to the professional courses’ level, Rs 15,000 aid to a poor family that sends children to schools, enhanced pensions and interest free loans to poor women.
The TDP government has come up with a slew of populist measures since January 2019. However, they haven’t found traction among people as they saw Jagan as a leader with credibility. Jagan always claimed he imbibed his credibility from his late father YSR.
Naidu’s flip-flops on a series of political and administrative issues—like accepting the special economic package for Andhra Pradesh by the BJP government and then rejecting it, ignoring the special category status issue and then reviving it, joining NDA and leaving it, going with Congress in Telangana and having no truck with the party in Andhra—have eroded the image of Naidu. This benefited Jagan.
Jagan played his family cards well. His mother Vijayamma and sister Sharmila have campaigned for him and joined his political missions whenever needed, but he scrupulously kept them away from party affairs. He fielded his mother from Visakhapatnam Lok Sabha seat in 2014, which she lost. But this time none of his family members contested the elections.
This contrasted with Naidu’s political baggage—his son and minister Nara Lokesh contested from the Mangalagiri Assembly seat and lost. Naidu’s brother-in-law and the late NTR’s son Balakrishna, however, won again from the Hindupur Assembly seat. Jagan’s final appeal to the public, urging them to give him a chance, worked well.
Jagan has no particular political ideology, except for providing better governance to the people.
“Give me a chance, I will see that I remain the Chief Minister for 30 years and live in your hearts after that,” is a popular statement by Jagan. After winning the election on 23 May, he said: “I want to be called by you all a good Chief Minister.”
Whether he will keep his word is to be seen in the coming months. As of now, he is in a better position compared to his predecessor Naidu. Jagan now enjoys cordial relations with both Prime Minister Modi and neighbouring Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
A weakened Naidu with just 23 TDP MLAs will be comforting for Jagan; now it’s over to him.