Ishwari Bajpai is Senior Advisor at NDTV; he has been a journalist for 30 years, and has covered the elections since 1984.
I have just spent four days in the old state of Andhra Pradesh, as it heads for a split into Telangana and Seemandhra. I met all the top politicians and attended half a dozen political rallies.
Sonia Gandhi's helicopter developed a problem on Sunday and could not take off after her speech in Chevella, near Hyderabad, in Telangana. It sums up the state of the Congress in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. Having divided the state that once used to vote en-bloc for the Congress ( 42-0 in 1977), the Congress is drifting towards defeat in Telangana and disaster in Seemandhra. And it has only itself to blame.
The Congress is arrogant, and its arrogance is its undoing. That is one thing agreed upon by the staunchest of political rivals - Jagan Reddy of the YSR Congress, K Chandrasekhar Rao of the TRS and Chandrandra Babu of the TDP. The Congress is also rudderless and leaderless.
The gloom at its party headquarter Gandhi Bhavan is obvious, but here there is at least a sense of a fight, led by Delhi's agents Digvijay Singh and Jairam Ramesh. Off the record, local Congressmen admit that seven parliamentary seats in Telangana and 50 ( out of 119) in the state legislature is what they expect.
That the Congress High Command (as they love to call it) could screw up twice in the state within five years is amazing. Jagan claims that after his father YSR died in 2009 while Chief Minister, all he wanted to do was thank the millions that supported him. Jagan's claim may ring hollow - he wanted to inherit both the wealth (which he did) and the power ( which he is about to) - but the Congress singularly failed to capture the mood of the people of Andhra and Jagan's ability to mobilize them.
And if they thought they could win the hearts of the people of Telangana by granting a 60-year old demand for a separate state, they blew that too. KCR, who led the Telangana movement for 14 years, cornered the credit with agility, claiming it was his pressure that forced the Congress to accede to his demands. While he does credit Sonia Gandhi for finally cutting the Andhra cord, he plays on the fact that more than 1000 people died in the Andhra agitation and the Congress has not apologized for it. At well-attended rallies across northern Telangana he repeats his refrain - he is the founder of Telengana, only he has an agenda for change (and that basically consists of thousands of crores of giveaways). And the public love it.
The Congress has in the last few days produced Rahul and Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in the battlefield. The response has been saturnine. The public is visibly bored with long-winded speeches about power plants and airports that the Congress has built. The Congress heavyweights blame KCR, and say he betrayed them. The message that they created Telangana and gave them the cash cow of Hyderabad is lost in this bitterness. Sonia, does try to reach out by using a bit of Telegu and touching a few hands but it seems too late -this is, after all, 24 hours before campaigning stops
KCR, a creation of Chandrababu Naidu, and now one of his bitter enemies, is a wily old man. As he finishes his breakfast in his uniform of blue shirt and white trousers, he shows why he is such a danger to the Congress. Blaming the Congress, especially Jairam Ramesh, for preventing an alliance between their parties, he says the Congress is full of old people with outdated views. He has a long list of his pros - people want change and he is offering them a clear vision of change; his policies ( giveaways ) are people-centric ( pension of Rs1000, waiver of farm loans, no road tax for auto-rickshaws, two-bedroom house for all); he has big plans for industry.
And industry is what fears him the most. As most industry is owned by Andhras, and much of it is in Hyderabad, they are not sure of their status. As settlers, will a TRS government in Telangana provide them protection or exploit them? Some are already looking to move to Vizag and the fear of "racial" reprisal is an undercurrent. KCR says he is not a fool and will protect everyone - he argues why should he destroy the hen that lays the golden egg.
The settlers hope that TRS's inherent weakness in the districts along the Andhra border's mixed population will allow the Congress, albeit in a coalition, to come to power in Telangana. Not that they love the Congress, but that seems to be the only choice given that the TDP and Jagan are associated with Andhra.
While Telanaga offers some hope for the Congress, Andhra offers none at all.
Jagan supporters say that the Congress thought he was too young and too inexperienced to replace his father as chief minister; he was conspired against, they say, by those who loathed YSR. If the trends turn into ground realities, Jagan could be the first Chief Minister of the new Andhra Pradesh state, and the Congress ends up with single digit seats in the assembly. A far cry from the power and the glory of 2009, when, with YSR , they had wiped out the TDP and TSR.
Jagan has certainly caught the imagination of the youth. And he repeats the cry that KCR makes - "people want change." He says the key to his campaign is women. He reaches out to them, stops where ever they are and hugs them; they will convince the men to vote for him, he says.
While a month ago, he was trailing Chandrababu Naidu's TDP in opinion polls, he seems much stronger now. The TDP's alliance with the BJP has sent the minorities to Jagan's camp. The ever-winning MIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi says that Muslims have been asked to vote for the secular party with the best chance of winning, which in Andhra is Jagan's YSR Congress. Similarly, Jagan, a Christian, is seen as picking up this minority group's support. The interesting thing is that no one is quite sure how large the Christian population in Andhra is. While the census places it at just 2%, almost everyone puts it at above 10%. Many converts don't officially admit to being Christian to protect their SC/ST rights.
As Chandrababu Naidu heads off for another day of hectic campaigning , he cedes that Jagan has strengths: money, media, minorities and the influential support base of the Reddys. He has reached out to the actor Pawan Kalyan to win back the youth. He claims that the majority of the Congress supporters have come to him and not Jagan and says " We are confident we will do well."
In the battle for the Seemandhra Jagan says he will win. Chandrababu is old, I am young, I have many terms in front of me, he can only have one. But one would be enough more Chandrababu right now.
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