National

The Cub Comes To Play

YSR’s son Jaganmohan has proved a canny operator so far. Will it get him the mantle?

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The Cub Comes To Play
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Jaganmohan’s Camp

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K.V.P. Ramachandra Rao

  • “Whatever we are doing, we are doing to save the state.”
  • “The Congress will split in Andhra if Jagan is not made CM. Nothing short of Jagan is acceptable to us.”
  • “He was YSR’s eyes and ears, therefore is most suited to carry on his legacy.”

Rival Camp

  • “Why are Jagan’s followers comparing him to Rajiv Gandhi?”
  • “He just won his first elections. He is inexperienced, needs to cut his teeth in politics before thinking of becoming CM.”
  • “Why is he silent when effigies of senior Congress leaders are being burnt?”

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“I know the Delhi game very well,” Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy once bragged to a close friend. “I’ll be chief minister by the time I am 35, just wait and see.” As it turned out, YSR overestimated his own genius: it took the Kadapa strongman another 20 years to figure out how to rise above the shadow of the Congress high command without rousing its suspicion. In the week after the Andhra chief minister died in a helicopter crash on September 2, YSR’s only son, Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, 36, is proving to be a chip of the old block: barely three months into his political career as a first-time MP, the son is just as confident as the father and perhaps twice as brash at playing the “Delhi game”.

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The speed and daring of Jagan’s bid to step into his father’s shoes has left rivals, both in the state and the party headquarters in Delhi, at a loss: even before YSR’s body was brought to Hyderabad on September 3, Jagan’s camp had persuaded 120 of the 154 Congress legislators to sign a letter supporting his claim as the next chief minister. Eventually, 148 MLAs signed the letter. And this despite the high command taking the usual precautions—appointing a successor, K. Rosaiah, YSR’s finance minister, within six hours of his body being recovered, putting off the CLP meeting indefinitely, and declaring an extended state mourning in a bid to keep decorum and nip any mutiny in the bud. A week of futile whip-cracking and fire-fighting later, the Jagan-as-CM campaign has only grown more unstoppable. On Wednesday, the last day of the declared mourning period, a sympathetic TV channel, NTV, aired an opinion poll by ACNielsen showing Jagan, a virtual infant in politics, outstripping his rivals, all of them veteran Congress leaders, by a whopping 78 per cent margin. In contrast, Rosaiah, the “interim” chief minister, got 13 per cent of the popular vote, and the rest, including PCC leader D. Srinivas and Union minister Jaipal Reddy, a mere 2 per cent each.

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Jaganmohan at YSR's funeral procession

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Fervent plea: Jaganmohan Reddy’s uncle Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi (above). Its key points:

  • Andhra’s people feel very strongly that Jaganmohan should be the next CM.
  • His Sakshi media empire played a major role in ensuring Congress victory in 2009.
  • He involved the youth in politics and skilfully negotiated with party rebels.
  • Jaganmohan, as successor, will continue the legacy of growth and welfare.

So who is this daring young novice from nowhere posing the most serious challenge the high command has faced in a Congress-ruled state in recent times? Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy first surfaced in the national news soon after the 2004 general elections: his uncle, Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy, who’d just won the Kadapa parliamentary seat a month ago, suggested to the high command that he be allowed to step down so that Jagan could replace him as MP. It was a proposal so blatant in its promotion of the family fiefdom that not even YSR’s legendary access to 10 Janpath could prevail upon the high command to accede to it.

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“Jagan has always been a man in a hurry, whether in business or politics,” explains an old business associate in Hyderabad. It took Jagan less than five years to rebuild the family’s fortunes, going from broke to assets of several hundred crores in a financial empire of power and cement plants, ports, iron ore mines, real estate and a media house. “Jagan was always an aggressive businessman, unlike his father, whose instincts were suicidal, both in business and politics.” There were years, the friend discloses, when the family went through such hard times that YSR would approach his friends for loans as small as Rs 25,000, “just to see the family through yet another financial crisis”. It was only when Jagan took charge of the family’s finances that things changed dramatically for the family. In his father’s first term as chief minister, critics say, Jagan emerged as a parallel power centre, cutting deals with real estate cartels and construction companies.

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In fact, many believe it was Jagan’s good head for business that made his father reluctant to initiate him into politics. “Someone had to make the money, and who better than Jagan?” But after YSR’s surprise win in 2004, Jagan became even more determined to launch his political career. “He knew how to emotionally blackmail his father,” a friend of YSR’s in Hyderabad says. “YSR’s soft spot was always his two children—Jagan and Sharmila. Both the children knew how to get around the father.” It’s well known in Hyderabad that YSR, who initially opposed Sharmila’s marriage to a classmate, a Hindu Brahmin, and even forcibly arranged a marriage for her with a suitable relative, eventually gave in and accepted Sharmila’s decision to remarry the person of her choice.

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But ask anyone in his extended family, and a different picture of Jagan emerges. Says Vivekananda Reddy’s daughter, Dr Suneetha Narreddy, “Anyone who believes that my father resented vacating his parliamentary seat for Jagan doesn’t really understand how our joint family works. My father has always thought of himself as Laxman to YSR’s Ram. He doesn’t think of Jagan as his nephew but his own son. It’s only natural that he wanted to surrender his seat to Jagan and retire from politics.”

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Interim CM K. Rosaiah

A year older than Jagan, Suneetha says Jagan and she grew up together, and even got married on the same day, in the same church. “When we were kids growing up in our family home in Pulivendula, Jagan was always the leader. We argued a lot, but he was always the captain, whether it was cricket or any other game we played. Even then, at 14-15, he had the politician in him, always sorting out everyone’s issues, and going with his father for his political rallies.” His education, by all accounts, was unremarkable: early education in a mission school in Pulivendula, then being admitted to Hyderabad Public School in the capital, where he completed his schooling before joining Nizam College for a bachelor’s degree. He then went abroad for a year to get an MBA from an unknown college somewhere in the UK. He had his share of boyish peccadilloes too, including a brush with a traffic cop, some say, and chasing after a filmstar’s daughter.

But he is hardly one of those bratty politician’s sons. Raised in a devout Christian family that “falls to its knees whenever anything happens, good or bad”, Jagan took to religion in a big way in his 20s. “It was under his sister’s influence,” Suneetha says. Sharmila’s formerly Brahmin husband, incidentally, is now an evangelist hailed as “Brother Anil” whose occasional visits to Hyderabad are widely publicised.

After Jagan turned to religion, Suneetha says, he changed quite a bit: “He became quieter, and very calm and mature.” She illustrates this change by describing how Jagan responded minutes after YSR’s copter disappeared. “He calmly took charge of the search operations, and even now, he’s consoling all of us, rather than the other way round.” The father and son were very close, says Suneetha. Officially, Jagan was based in Bangalore, from where he ran his various businesses, but he was in Hyderabad at least four days a week. “Jagan was YSR’s eyes and ears, giving him daily reports on all that was going on in the state. They shared the same concerns, whether it was politics or welfare projects.”

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A close associate of Jagan’s agrees: “He isn’t into flashy cars or a flashy lifestyle. The family begins its day with prayers, and retires for a family dinner at 8.30 pm.” For instance, he says, YSR took his family for a thanksgiving trip to Bethlehem soon after his electoral victory this year “when they could have easily gone to Las Vegas or something. Instead, they went to Bethlehem and came back. Their idea of a family holiday is to go to their farmhouse near Pulivendula.”

Flashy he certainly is not, but Jagan certainly understands the value of hi-tech self-promotion, relying on a close group of technocrats, advertising and media professionals and even his tech-savvy cousins to do the needful, whether it is his many fan clubs, which are said to rival a film star’s, or to coordinate his current political campaign to become his father’s successor.

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In fact, his hi-tech spin doctors may be just a little too efficient for Jagan’s good. Political observers point out how the 24-hour TV coverage of YSR’s death, a first of its kind in the state, was cleverly manipulated to promote Jagan. It may just backfire, they say, pointing out how the high command hasn’t taken kindly to the high-decibel demonstrations throughout the state. Besides, such media-built frenzy is bound to be short-lived.

YSR, as political analyst Jyotirmaya Sharma points out, was a chief minister in the grand old mould: a visionary who also openly aided and abetted corruption. A man for whom money was merely a tool to advance power. Can the son, with his finely-honed business instincts, ever match the father?

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