The Burden of Legacy

Jagan Mohan Reddy promised to take his father YSR’s legacy forward. Has he managed to keep his word?

- Anisha Reddy

IT was in September 2009. In the quiet lanes of Hyderabad, which was then in undivided Andhra Pradesh, people wailed loudly in the streets. Tyres were burnt, vehicles were forcibly stopped. Over 450 people died of ‘shock’. Their idol, the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajashekhar Reddy, popularly known as YSR, who had achieved a cult status after bringing the Congress to power in 2004 and 2009, died in a helicopter crash after his chopper went missing somewhere above the Nallamala Forest in the Eastern Ghats, between Andhra Pradesh and what is now Telangana.

One such farmer from Warangal penned a suicide note, saying he was dedicating his life to YSR “who had in turn sacrificed his life to the people.” Three weeks later, near the crash site, Jagan Mohan Reddy anointed himself king and the person who would take his father’s legacy forward, irrespective of whether the Congress party would let him or not.

YSR, a lifelong Congressman, led with the slogan ‘development and credibility’. He walked 1,470 km during his historic ‘padayatra’ in the summer of 2003. He spoke to farmers, women and people from backward areas about their suffering and would pen his thoughts down in a notebook. “By 2014 General Elections, the Congress will get absolute majority on its own and Rahul Gandhi will become the Prime Minister of India. Nobody can stop this,” Reddy had written.

The mass leader wouldn’t have imagined then that twenty years since he walked those streets, relations between his son and Congress party loyalists would be extremely sour and that his children would be political rivals.