CAPITALISING ON SIBLING RIVALRY

JAGAN FACES A CHALLENGER IN SISTER SHARMILA, WHO HAS NOW JOINED THE CONGRESS TO LAY A COMPETING CLAIM TO THE LEGACY OF THEIR FATHER, THE LATE YSR 

- Amarnath K. Menon

On January 4, even as All India Congress Committee president Mallikarjun Kharge welcomed Y.S. Sharmila, daughter of the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), the former chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh, into the Congress with a shawl in the party’s tricolours, her brother and current CM, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy of the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), was in Hyderabad spending two hours with the convalescing K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR)—whose Bharat Rashtra Samithi had just lost the mandate in contiguous Telangana—and perhaps learning from their failure amid new challenges.

Sibling rivalry now threatens to tear asunder YSR’s political legacy that Jagan had reclaimed after years of tumultuous struggle. YSR’s tragic death in a helicopter crash in September 2009, shortly after he led the Congress to a second consecutive assembly election win, had led to a parting of ways with the family. Jagan floated his own political formation in 2011, taking away some of the Congress base. Then came the reorganisation of the state itself in 2014, and the birth of Telangana. The Grand Old Party hit rock bottom when it failed to win a single seat and only 2.4 per cent of the vote share in the 2014 election (presumably because the voters blamed it for the bifurcation), which slipped even further to 1.2 per cent in 2019 (less than the number of votes polled for NOTA).