The Siddham Campaign, 2024: Executing the Four Siddham Meetings

"Siddham" means "ready". In early 2024 it became the name of the YSRCP campaign for the May elections. It ran as four regional public meetings between January and March, and then a bus yatra across the state. I coordinated campaign activities through this period, as I had in earlier campaigns. Here is what the Siddham campaign looked like from the execution side.

Four meetings, four regions

Meeting	Date	Venue	Reported scale*
Bheemili	27 Jan 2024	Sangivalasa, Visakhapatnam	2.5–5 lakh
Denduluru	3 Feb 2024	Eluru district, about 110-acre ground	about 7 lakh
Raptadu	18 Feb 2024	Anantapur district, about 110 acres	about 10 lakh
Medarametla (Addanki)	10 Mar 2024	Bapatla district, about 98 acres	43 constituencies mobilised

*Crowd figures are estimates reported by the party and the press, not independent counts.

Each meeting drew from a whole region. For the final meeting at Medarametla, which was moved from 3 March to 10 March to finish arrangements, supporters came from 43 Assembly constituencies across six districts: Guntur, Palnadu, Bapatla, Prakasam, Nellore and Tirupati.

A temporary city for one afternoon

At that scale a public meeting is really a temporary city. Raptadu, for example, was arranged on about 110 acres with 16 separate parking areas. Behind every such ground sit the same problems:

• Movement. Getting buses and vehicles from dozens of constituencies to the right entry points on time, and then home again safely.
• Basic needs. Water, shade, first aid and sanitation for people who may have travelled since dawn.
• Flow. Separate entries, galleries and exits so a crowd of lakhs never becomes a crush.
• Coordination. Constituency in-charges were each responsible for their own people. That only works if the plan gives every one of them a clear slot, route and contact.

Staging and broadcast

Siddham was also a communication design. The stage used a Y-shaped ramp, with the "Why Not 175" slogan at its centre, that brought the leader closer to the crowd. The meetings were telecast live on television, social media and LED screens, reaching far more people than any ground could hold. Cinematic posters and campaign songs gave the whole series one recognisable identity. Professional teams, including I-PAC, worked on branding and booth-level programmes such as "Memu Siddham, Maa Booth Siddham". As always, much of the ground work was done by local cadres and volunteers.

Memantha Siddham: back on the old route

After the four meetings came the Memantha Siddham ("we are all ready") bus yatra, from late March to 24 April 2024. It deliberately retraced the Praja Sankalpa Yatra route, from YSR Ghat at Idupulapaya towards Srikakulam, and covered all 25 districts. For those of us who had worked on the padayatra six years earlier, it was a striking echo: the same roads, now travelled at the speed of a campaign bus and broadcast live.

What Siddham taught me

Scale is a planning problem before it is a political one. The size of a crowd is decided weeks earlier, in transport plans and in commitments from local coordinators.

Every big event is really dozens of small ones. Each constituency contingent is its own operation, with its own lead.

Crowds are not votes. Siddham drew enormous reported crowds, and the election result two months later was very different from what those crowds suggested. I write about that in Lessons from Winning and Losing. It is the most important thing an event planner in politics can learn.