Strategist Prashant Kishor's Status With Congress Unchanged, Say Sources

Prashant Kishor remains the top election strategist for the Congress in its bid for Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, insisted sources close to the 37-year-old, whose roster of former clients includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Media reports on television channels and newspapers have claimed that Mr Kishor is about to be pink-slipped by the Congress, to whom he has been loaned out by another ex-client, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Mr Kishor has reportedly aggravated the Congress, a party with an unbending rigidity to hierarchy, by initiating an outreach to Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose Samajwadi Party currently governs Uttar Pradesh.

Last week, Mr Kishor met with Mulayam Singh in Delhi, a move that was not sanctioned, according to Raj Babbar, who is the Congress' chief for Uttar Pradesh.  "It's a free country, he can meet anybody," said Mr Babbar to NDTV, while stressing the Congress' aversion to an alliance with Mulayam Singh unless he resolves a high-decibel feud with his son, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.

Undiminished by the criticism, Mr Kishor struck out yesterday with a two-hour follow-up session with Akhilesh Yadav, reportedly seen within the Congress as another act of defiance. "The old guard within the Congress is planting these stories," sources close to Mr Kishor said, adding that "he is very much still working for the party."

Since March this year when Mr  Kishor signed up to handle the Congress, he has run into a wall of seemingly inexorable opposition within the party, who are supposedly uncomfortable with his unrestricted access to the Gandhis, the family around whom the party is hinged.  Opponents allegedly include Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mr Babbar, and, more recently, Ahmed Patel, the powerful top aide to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

Sources deny that Mr Kishor was discussed in detail at a meeting yesterday of the Congress Working Committee, the top decision-making body of the party. The session was unusually chaired by Rahul Gandhi because his mother, Sonia, was unwell.

Mr Kishor's tendency to offer inputs for the selection of candidates and partnerships has not earned him friends, his aides acknowledge, but they say he sees his job as not just data-crunching but  crafting a possible route to success.  

That is a tall order.  The Congress placed fourth in the last state election in Uttar Pradesh; just two years later, Rahul and Sonia Gandhi were the only party MPs from Uttar Pradesh to win the general election.

Mr Kishor's consults with the Yadavs is being compared to last year's assembling of a non-BJP multi-party "Grand Alliance"in Bihar which included the Congress and succeeded in the re-election of Mr Kumar.  After his victory, Mr Kumar created a government post for Mr Kishor that places him at par with a cabinet minister, an office to which he is meant to return after the state elections are held in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.