My Journey in Political Campaign Management: From the Praja Sankalpa Yatra to Siddham

Politics is not a game of power. It is a responsibility. I did not always put it that way. But after seven years of working inside election campaigns in Andhra Pradesh, it is the sentence I keep coming back to.

My name is Sirigireddy Arjun Reddy. People usually see a campaign as a stage, a speech and a crowd. I spent most of my time on everything behind that stage. That means the route of a march, the bus that brings a village to a meeting, the survey sheet a volunteer fills in at a doorstep, and the WhatsApp group that tells two hundred young people where to be at six in the morning. This series is my record of that work.

Where it started: the padayatra, 2017

On 6 November 2017, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy began the Praja Sankalpa Yatra at Idupulapaya in Kadapa district. By the time it ended at Ichchapuram in Srikakulam on 9 January 2019, it had covered 3,648 km in 341 days across all 13 districts of the state as they then were.

I was deeply involved in organising the YS Jagan padayatra from the beginning. I coordinated its execution end to end, including the public meetings and gatherings along the route and the surveys we ran alongside it. I worked alongside the I-PAC team, the political consultancy the party had engaged that year, and learned more about structured campaigning in those fourteen months than in any classroom. I have written about the logistics in a separate piece.

Building a youth network

Somewhere along that walk I realised a campaign does not run on its leaders. It runs on thousands of people whose names never appear anywhere. So I began building a network of young volunteers, which we called ARF, the Arjun Reddy Family. By my own count it grew to roughly 15,000 to 20,000 young people across constituencies in Andhra Pradesh. How we built it, and what kept it together, is its own story.

2019: execution at scale

The 2019 YSRCP campaign was the first time I saw every piece come together. These included on-ground mobilisation, offline events, surveys and a social media operation that had to keep pace with all of it. I worked on the on-ground and offline execution and on social media outreach. The party won 151 of the 175 Assembly seats and 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats. I share what I took from that campaign in The 2019 Campaign: Lessons in Ground Execution.

2022–2024: outreach, health camps and Siddham

After 2019 the work changed shape. Programmes like Gadapa Gadapaku Mana Prabhutvam (door-to-door outreach, from May 2022) and Jagananna Aarogya Suraksha (health camps, from September 2023) were about staying in touch with people, not winning them over. Then came the Siddham campaign in 2024, with four large public meetings between January and March and a bus yatra that followed the old padayatra route. I coordinated many campaign activities in this period. I write about door-to-door outreach and Siddham separately.

Winning and losing

In 2019 the party won 151 seats. In 2024 it won 11, even with close to 40% of the vote. I was part of both campaigns. The second taught me at least as much as the first, and I have tried to write about it honestly.

Why I am writing this

There are three reasons. The first is to keep a record. The second is that campaign management in India is a real discipline, with real craft in logistics, data, communication and people management, and it deserves to be written about seriously. The third is that the skills transfer. Running a march across a state, or a volunteer network of thousands, teaches you about operations, coordination and trust. It is the same thinking I now bring to building businesses.

These essays describe my work on campaigns. They are not an argument for or against any party. Andhra Pradesh has a lively democracy, and I respect everyone who takes part in it, including those on the other side of the ballot.