The elections to Andhra Pradesh state assembly are just a few months away and major political parties – Telugu Desam Party headed by chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and the YSR Congress party headed by Y S Jaganmohan Reddy have started collecting the feedback from the ground level as to what their winning chances are.
While Naidu, being the chief minister of the state, has the advantage of getting the feedback from the state intelligence department, besides private agencies, Jagan has no option but to depend on the internal and external surveys.
More often than not, the surveys conducted by the private agencies are far from accurate, as they go by the mandate given by the respective political parties which engage them. They tend to please the parties with exaggerated survey reports.
Even for Naidu, the intelligence reports are fudged to keep him in good humour. So, he has to depend on his own reliable internal surveys.
For YSRC, Jagan is solely banking on the periodical field reports being given by the teams of Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) headed by political strategist Prashant Kishor.
The teams are said to be doing candid surveys and giving exact feedback to the boss, so that he can correct mistakes wherever they are and select the right candidates.
In 2014, Jagan had to bank on the members of his media house Sakshi, who out of their loyalty to the boss, gave him inaccurate reports.
There were allegations that the field-level reporters of Sakshi had also collected money from ticket aspirants and gave a wrong feedback to the party leadership.
Since Jagan was just out his long-stay in jail, he hardly had any time to cross-check the veracity of these reports, sources said.
This time, for good or bad, Jagan wants to go only by the PK team reports and cross-check with his local leadership, instead of depending on his media team.
It is learnt PK team has advised Jagan to keep Sakshi out of the picture for the elections, sources said.