YSR Congress party president and former Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy might have addressed over a dozen press conferences in the last 15 months of losing power to the Telugu Desam Party-led coalition in the last assembly elections.
Every time, Jagan talks high about the welfare schemes and the developmental initiatives taken by him during his tenure and blames it on the misleading campaign unleashed by the TDP and Jana Sena Party against him and false promises made by Chandrababu Naidu.
Even at the Wednesday’s press conference, Jagan said despite doing a lot of good for the people, he could not win because he had failed to do any publicity for his government in the media, unlike the TDP and its allies who have the huge media backing.
Assuming what Jagan has said is correct, there is no one he can blame except himself. In fact, he had a massive publicity mechanism when he was in power, compared to the present TDP government.
Apart from his own media house Sakshi, Jagan had a huge network of publicity managers under Information and Public Relations department, a media advisor, a media wing within the CMO headed by chief public relations officer, a private publicity agency (Perfect Relations) and a separate team under Jagan’s close aide Iragavarapu Avinash alias Trump Avinash.
Besides, there was a strong social media network on behalf of the party and also a digital media network, churning out reports on social media on behalf of the government.
Above all, there was a powerful team of Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), which was involved in massive publicity campaign.
The media houses, individual journalists and even digital media houses were being bombarded with the government news and the YSRCP news day in and day out, along with pictures and videos. The journalists were also “take care of” by the Jagan’s campaign team regularly.
Yet, Jagan now feels he had to face such a big defeat due to lack of enough publicity. Analysts, however, say it was not because of lack of enough publicity, but because of lack of right publicity which would have got Jagan a good image in the public.
“All the publicity wings of the government during his regime focussed only on routine schemes and political press conferences. There was no major publicity about any infrastructure work like roads, projects or any major constructions,” an analyst said.
He said unlike Jagan, what Naidu is doing is highlighting Amaravati works or IT projects in Visakhapatnam or securing of funds from the Centre.
“Secondly, Naidu is regularly meeting the media and giving interviews to top national channels. But Jagan had hardly interacted with media during his five-year tenure. Now, he is regularly addressing press conferences,” the analyst pointed out.
