Akhilesh taking on PM at his own game

Lucknow : Prime Minister Narendra Modi out-campaigned all-comers in the 2014 general election but, as he faces his biggest mid-term test, he is up against a rival determined to beat him at his own game. In Uttar Pradesh his opponent, CM Akhilesh Yadav, has been repackaged as a youthful and media-savvy go-getter who seeks to steal a unique selling point of Modi's – development.

Yadav, who received a university education in Australia yet became typecast as the ineffectual scion of a political patriarch, decided he needed a makeover. Yadav commissioned the construction of a mansion behind his old party headquarters to operate as his campaign "war room." "The recruitment brief was clear: Everyone working in the war room should be in their thirties and have family in Uttar Pradesh," said Aashish Yadav, a campaign manager who previously worked at BBC Media Action, a development charity.

By teaming up with Rahul Gandhi of Congress - another forty-something politician – Yadav hopes to prevail in the three-cornered contest with the BJP and the BSP. Gandhi and Yadav have both turned for advice to Prashant Kishor, the strategist who stage-managed Modi's triumphant 2014 march on New Delhi. Kishor later switched sides to help a similar opposition alliance defeat the BJP in Bihar, another big northern state, in late 2015. He now divides his time between advising Congress and Samajwadi.

The BJP's state leader in Uttar Pradesh, Keshav Prasad Maurya, dismisses the alliance as a fiasco and called the war room a poor imitation. "Yadav and Gandhi both lack imagination," he told Reuters. "Being Modi is different from being like Modi."

By Rupam Jain