Prashant Kishor at his wit's end to revive Congress for UP polls

Prashant Kishor's success in chalking out the ultimate strategy that helped Nitish Kumar-Lalu Prasad Yadav sweep the Bihar elections might have won him kudos and made him a hot commodity for the Congress, which grabbed him to undertake the “impossible” in Uttar Pradesh.

But the ace political strategist was beginning to realise that his new task – of putting the Congress back on tracks in a politically far more complex state - where the party had been on the fringe for close to three decades, was a completely different ballgame.

“PK”, as he is popularly referred to, was on his second trip to Lucknow last week to make an assessment of the spadework required to rejuvenate the grand old party from its long and deep slumber.

Sure enough, even before he touched down in Lucknow for the first time, earlier this month, he knew that the party needed a thorough shake-up. But that he would also need to infuse life into the dormant rank and file of the party was something he had not imagined.

Also read: Prashant Kishor's real test begins now with Rahul Gandhi

The state Congress is led by a tired and virtually-retired president Nirmal Khatri, and is under the guidance of an almost clueless state in-charge Madhusoodan Mistry. Two days that Kishor spent interacting with the unenthusiastic “youth team” of the party made him realise how many loose ends he needed to tighten.

Knowing what a divided house the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) was, Kishor chose to kickstart his mission by tapping the youth in the party. No wonder he focused his attention on frontal organisations of the party, including the Youth Congress, Sewa Dal, Mahila Congress and more pointedly, the party’s minority cell.

But what left him at his wit’s end were questions raised by some of the young Congress aspirants.

“How will we enter the poll fray without a chief ministerial face?" they asked.

“It is nearly three decades since we have been out of power with the result that everybody’s spirit has faded and there is no one in the state who could inspire the youth,” added the young aspirants. Unlike Bihar, where Kishor had to prepare a blueprint of the strategy to be adopted by the Nitish-Lalu combine to combat the might of Narendra Modi’s BJP, Uttar Pradesh involves a much larger task.

It is not just about raising the cadres, but also activating the functionaries at all levels before a strategy could be thrashed out and put on the ground.

Also read: Can Prashant Kishor help Rahul Gandhi save face in UP?

Yet, the strategist talked about focusing on Dalits and minorities. It is said that Kishor is hopeful about making inroads into both these vote banks as a section of these communities were already appearing quite disillusioned with their traditional icons – Bahujan Samaj Party's Mayawati and Samajwadi Party's Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The younger Dalits were not impressed by Mayawati’s splurge of thousands of crores on stone monuments and statues. While nothing was done to provide employment to the educated Dalits, even where jobs were created in the government, they went only to applicants loaded with money bags. Likewise, there was a growing realisation among the Muslims that Mulayam was taking them for granted.

Apart from the handling of the Muzaffarnagar riots which left Muslims at the receiving end, what had angered the community even more were Mulayam’s recent utterances, regretting the firing he had ordered on violent Hindu karsewaks when they tried to storm the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1990 when the Samajwadi Party chief was the chief minister of the state.

His decision to walk out of the grand alliance in Bihar at the eleventh hour was also viewed by many as a blatant move, one that would benefit the BJP.

Also read: Will Prashant Kishor magic work in Uttar Pradesh?

Keeping that in mind, Kishor proposes to build a workforce of 10,000 Dalits and as many number of Muslims, while Congress veterans have been advised to retrieve a chunk of the upper caste vote as well. But the major thrust would be on impressing upon the Dalits and Muslims on how they were taken for a ride by Mayawati and Mulayam.

Kishor was hopeful that once the Congress was able to convey its seriousness about staging a comeback, a good number of Dalits and Muslims would revert to the party. He called for the need to build a structural base for the party at each of the 403 Assembly constituencies.

And as if to inject a morale booster, he also sought to impress upon the laid-back partymen that time was ripe not just to raise the tally of the party in March 2017 but to strive towards staging a comeback in the state where it ruled for four long decades before being voted out in the aftermath of the “Mandal–Kamandal” wave in 1989.

Kishor is full of ideas and strategies to chalk out a broad revival plan for the Congress. But whether he would be in a position to rid the party of its many ills - inertia, infighting, mistrust, absence of teamwork and above all, frequent change of leadership - remains a million dollar question.