YSR Congress party government headed by Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy might be claiming to have successfully prevented opposition leader and Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu’s attempt to take out a rally to Palnadu to create a big hungama there on Wednesday.
But what it failed to realize was that Naidu has got what he wanted: massive publicity in local and national media.
While YSRC leaders have confined themselves to addressing press conferences that got little publicity, the entire media focus was only on Naidu and his high drama.
The Chalo Atmakur rally of Naidu, aimed at giving a moral boost to the cadre, caught the attention of the national media.
Generally, regional parties, that too which had faced debacle in the elections, hardly get any coverage in the national media.
But the Chalo Atmakur rally attracted the national media’s attention. Reason: the YSRC government chose to keep Naidu and his son Lokesh, besides a large number of TDP leaders under house arrest.
All these days, the media was agog with the reports of house arrest of opposition leaders in Jammu and Kashmir.
When Naidu and his men were kept under house arrest, the national media found similarities between AP and Kashmir and thought something sensational might have happened in Andhra. So, they came running to AP.
They not only gave extensive coverage to his house arrest right from the morning, they also went to Atmakuru to dig into the ground situation in Palnadu region.
It was a big news of the day for the national channels and newspapers. The channels conducted a live debate on Chalo Atmakuru issue, which was unprecedented.
Thus, Naidu successfully managed to ensure that the issue got the national attention. And the media gave a huge build-up to his arrest and the Palnadu issue, as if it was a national issue.
On the other hand, Jagan’s media managers have miserably failed to catch this point.
One does not know whether anything would have happened had Naidu been allowed to take out a rally to Atmakuru, but by denying him the chance and keeping him under house arrest projected the Jagan government in a bad light.
And the so-called national media advisors of Jagan could not give proper advices to him and remained mute spectators when the TDP was hogging all the limelight.
“When Jagan was in the opposition, he did not have any media advisors. Yet, his padayatra and his speeches had got tremendous coverage in the media. Now, with so many PROs and advisors around him, he failed to counter the opposition propaganda. It is very unfortunate,” a senior journalist commented.
