From our Bureau
NEW DELHI: Can poll strategist Prashant Kishore revive the political fortunes of the country’s oldest party and turn it into an election fighting machine is a question sharply divided the senior leaders of the Congress, making the task of party’s interim president Sonia Gandhi challenging and therefore difficult.
While 45-year-old Prashant Kishor Pandey, who is also known as PK as many of Socialist background had decided to shun their respective surnames to renounce caste in the sixties, gave a detailed presentation, rather a route map to over a dozen senior party leaders that included Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi at 10 Janpath on Saturday for the Congress revival to take on the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2024 general elections. The decision to admit the poll strategist into the party and allow him to work according to his plan has been left with Sonia Gandhi.
Prashant has not asked for any post in the Congress but obviously he has asked for a free hand to implement his action plan which includes focusing party’s energy and resources on 360 and odd Lok Sabha seats, leaving around 183 seats for seat adjustment with like-minded non-BJP parties.
At the same time, he has stressed upon building the party’s image as a credible national party which has an ideology and vision to build rather rebuild the country while evolving opposition unity on a common minimum platform and programme.
His route map for reviving the Congress image in popular perception, sources said, is comprehensive and is multi-dimensional which categorically understates national media and its role. Regional media and vernacular media need special attention of the party because information often rises from the grassroots.
A leader said that his presentation had impressed senior leaders and that is why Sonia Gandhi was asked to take the final decision. Sonia reportedly said she will do it after taking other leaders who were not present on 16 April into confidence.
By other leaders, she meant some important members of the G23 group, sources said.
Opposition to Prashant Kishor’s entry into the party is coming from a set of leaders who see him as a threat to their relevance. They are the same leaders who have been consistently undermining rather subverting former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s plans to democratise the party structure and entry of young leaders.
Some of these leaders have been in league with RSS and BJP leaders to project Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” in popular eyes.
A senior leader said that the party high command should remember as how Prashant Kishor’s strategy had miserably failed in 2017 in UP elections when the party could win just 7 assembly seats. It may be recalled here that UP fiasco was not because PK’s plan had failed but it was more because the senior leaders had not cooperated and the party had not worked to build up a youthful team.
Prashant Kishor has reportedly conveyed that the Congress needs youth to galvanise itself by allowing them to play a leading role as senior leaders can’t fight on streets. The poll strategist has underlined that the Congress whether in 1969 or in 1977-78 had fought its way back to power by allowing youth to be at the vanguard. They have both the energy and idealism to sacrifice for the party and not merely to taste power.
He has, reportedly, cautioned the party’s top leadership that some seniors would leave the party opposing his entry or would pinprick the party through media from time to time. Majority of these leaders have access to the national media which is always ready to sully Congress’s image, he contended.
Kishor, who has worked with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was the Gujarat chief minister, brings with him an objective understanding of the Congress and its weaknesses and strengths and therefore could act as a catalyst for the party’s revival by igniting popular imagination with useful information about the Congress and the BJP.
In 2004 when India was shining under the Vajpayee government, the Congress by choosing an international advertising agency Leo Burnett for its media campaign had emerged as the single largest party leaving the BJP behind.
Services of professionals has increasingly become a part and parcel of today’s political life. Prashant Kishor has helped Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Punjab chief ministers to win assembly elections in the past. His credentials are sound and if he is ready to keep his reputation and credibility at stake, the party should give chance and required freedom as the Congress has nothing to lose only to gain at this juncture, a leader said.
There are many seniors who are divided on the advantage of inducting Prashant and give him a free hand, but all are keeping quiet since the plan to rope him in the party has come from the Gandhis.
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