VIJAYAWADA: Exuding confidence that the YSRC will win more seats than it did in 2019, party president and Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on Thursday said the entire country will look at Andhra Pradesh because of YSRC’s landslide victory. During his meeting with the representatives of Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), he dismissed Prashant Kishor’s prediction that the YSRC will lose big this time and quipped, “The numbers would be far greater than what Prashant could have ever dreamt of.”
In an interaction with this newspaper in March this year, ace election strategist and I-PAC co-founder Prashant Kishor had predicted that the YSRC is losing. “I see this whole assumption that Jagan is too strong to be defeated has no legs. He is on a sticky wicket. I have no data or firsthand experience (of the political situation in AP) but my gut is telling me that he is losing big,” he had said. Prashant Kishor had played a key role in Jagan’s landslide victory in 2019. Later, he moved away from professional political strategising and launched his own Jan Suraaj Abhiyaan in Bihar.
Speaking on the internal conflict within the political consulting firm, Jagan told I-PAC co-founder and director Rishi Raj Singh that it was the team that mattered and not the individual. “I want to tell Rishi, Prashant is not what matters, it is this team that matters,” he stressed.
He lauded the I-PAC team for their services for the YSRC in the last one-and-a-half years and asserted that the YSRC will create history in this election, too. “We won 151 Assembly and 22 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and we will win more seats this time to provide a much better governance,” he said. Further, he highlighted how I-PAC helped the government streamline the schemes and make them more efficient.
Terming the services of I-PAC invaluable, the Chief Minister said the YSRC government will work harder for the people in the next five years and observed that the journey of YSRC with I-PAC will continue in the future as well. “For the 2029 elections, this team will be with us,” he promised.