UP election results 2017: Golden boy Prashant Kishor swept by Saffron wave?

The BJP is all set to cross the 300-seat mark in Uttar Pradesh - a thumping 3/4th majority in the state assembly. This is the largest ever win for the party in the state and mimics its success from the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Someone who ended up on the wrong side was that poll strategist incomparable Prashant Kishor. The master-poll strategist would now do well to lie low - given that he has been proved wrong in not just Uttar Pradesh but also in Uttarakhand, where the saffron landslide has been such that even the sitting chief minister Harish Rawat lost from two seats.

After he worked on BJP's 2014 poll pitch and then got Nitish-Lalu's strategy bang on in Bihar, Kishor was hired by the Congress to set its house in order in Uttar Pradesh primarily. He was then the man with the Midas-touch, the golden boy who could do no wrong. Except everyone forgot the moral of the story - the Midas touch wasn't a boon, it was a curse. And Mr Kishor, through no fault of his own, was attributed such magical powers at winning elections.

It is said that Prashant Kishor persuaded the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party to go in for an alliance with the Congress. It seems however that Uttar Pradesh didn't like the saath after all. Together they polled about 30% of the votes, a chunk in which Congress was a single-digit contributor. In terms of seats, it seems the Congress will get 7-8.

Admittedly Kishor had a tough assignment with the Grand Old Party paying little or no heed to the suggestions made. Case in point was Raj Babbar's appointment as state PCC chief last year. Politics and political messaging remained in the hands of the party and Kishor's team was restricted to putting together district-wise election manifestos to identifying local issues that merit mention in campaign speeches, to undertaking the door-to-door campaigns to spread the good word for the Congress .

The political consultant is largely an American phenomena - one that we became extremely familiar with in names like Karl Rove , David Axelrod and Steve Bannon - advisors to the US Presidents. Political consultants the world over analyse big data and craft a message that's best suited to make their clients (parties) win at the hustings. But as exit poll after exit poll, opinion poll after opinion poll have shown - the battle, at least in India, is won in the heat and dust of the campaign trail. It is the political workers who must mobilise, do the spadework in constituencies, get the party's message out there and bring feedback from the ground to the party's central leadership.

The loss in the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand may not be the end of the road for Prashant Kishor, but the verdict does certainly prove the value of having a dedicated and committed cadre, a strong grass-roots party organisation that can then effectively be complimented with a 'consultant' structuring and dovetailing such efforts. After all no salesman can sell a bad product and that too for a long time.