Leadership

Ahmed Ali Khan’s work in Kurnool is carried out within the YSR Congress Party, under the leadership of its president, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy. It is a political relationship he speaks about often, and one that shapes how he approaches the city.

What he takes from that leadership is a way of working rather than a slogan: that a party’s worth is measured by what reaches the person at the end of the queue. Welfare delivered without a middleman. Attention paid to the wards that are usually asked to wait. A representative who answers when called, and who can be found in the colony rather than only on a stage.

That is the standard he has tried to hold himself to in Kurnool city. When the state government moved to privatise seventeen government medical colleges and hospitals, he took the campaign against it to the streets of Kurnool ward by ward, and 64,577 residents of this city signed. When wards were redrawn without notice, the matter went to the Andhra Pradesh High Court and the process was stayed. When the voter-roll revision left people confused about their own enrolment, his office ran help desks in the areas where that confusion does the most damage.

None of that is unusual for a city president. It is simply what the job is, done consistently, in a city he has lived in his whole life. He works for the YSR Congress Party in Kurnool because he believes its record on welfare, on minorities and on the poor is the one worth defending — and because in Kurnool, that work still has to be done street by street.