NEW DELHI: While the Congress created enough interest in political circles by hiring campaign strategist Prashant Kishor to handle the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, of late the party has been making news over its differences with Kishor’s strategy. It is learnt Kishor will be largely off Uttar Pradesh for now.He will be focusing more on Punjab and roped in for UP at the last leg of campaign if required. It is also gathered that only the core team from PK camp is stationed at Lucknow . Most of the others having been sent back.The move has come after a stormy meeting in New Delhi on November 8, where the UP Congress leaders conveyed to the party leadership its inability to operate with PK.While the Congress in UP has been simmering considerably over its differences with PK and his working style, the strongest difference of opinion came after Kishor’s meeting with Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. Speculation has also been there that PK was probably considering an exit from the Congress and drawing up documents for a possible partnership with the SP instead.Both issues came up at the November 8 meeting. Congress’ CM candidate Sheila Dikshit had in an interview to ETon November 4 said that PK meeting with Mulayam Singh Yadav was ‘strange’ as he was engaged as the Congress strategist and this meeting brought a ‘a different kind of picture’ and put a ‘lot of question marks in a lot of people’.PK has also insisted on carrying out a Priyanka Gandhi centric election campaign all over UP. It was initially planned that her campaign would take off in the first week of November and would only wind up in mid-January when the last leg of the campaign would kick in and the entire Gandhi family would be fielded.The dynamics in UP, however, changed dramatically after the surgical strike across the border followed by the open rift in the SP camp. Both have forced all political parties to recalibrate their strategies.The Congress also realised that it had lost the momentum gathered with Rahul Gandhi’s Kisan Yatra owing to these two factors. So the party view was that it would not be advisable to field Priyanka Gandhi for a full-fledged campaign at such a juncture.Sources say that PK has refused to participate in any campaign in UP if Priyanka Gandhi was not brought in and had even offered to resign over the issue.As was the case earlier in the campaign when PK suddenly withdrew from the ‘27 saal, UP behaal’ campaign, team PK is learnt to have declined to manage the new Dalit campaign in UP that the Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi is quite interested in.The non-cooperation led to a delay in the campaign launch this month due to logistical problems. The friction between Team PK and the state unit is learnt to have reached such a stage recently that at one point, many of the members of Team PK moved out of Lucknow and came back to Delhi.They, however, returned again after things cooled down. Differences apart, PK is acknowledged even by the UP Congress as a ‘brilliant’ campaign strategist. Both the Kisan Maangpatra and the Kisan Yatra were his ideas and were received very well on ground.