Jagan faces a challenger in sister Sharmila, who has now joined the Congress to lay a competing claim to the legacy of their father, the late YSR

SIGN ME UP: Y.S. Sharmila with Rahul Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Jan. 4 (Photo: Getty Images)

On January 4, even as All India Congress Committee president Mallikarjun Kharge welcomed Y.S. Sharmila, daughter of the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), the former chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh, into the Congress with a shawl in the party’s tricolours, her brother and current CM, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy of the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), was in Hyderabad spending two hours with the convalescing K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR)—whose Bharat Rashtra Samithi had just lost the mandate in contiguous Telangana—and perhaps learning from their failure amid new challenges.