LUCKNOW: Prashant Kishor will steer the Congress campaign for 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections after his triumphs as the strategist behind PM Narendra Modi and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar’s thumping electoral victories.The Congress decided to bring in Kishor after party vice president Rahul Gandhi held another meeting with him last week, a person close to the political strategist told ET. Kishor will report directly to Gandhi and may pitch for a larger role for Gandhi’s sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in the polls, including perhaps projecting her as the party’s chief ministerial candidate, the person said.ET had on November 19 last year first reported that Kishor was in talks with Congress to manage the party’s campaign in UP. “He (Kishor) isn’t very impressed with the current Congress set-up and has set his conditions. This includes hiring a team of professionals from outside, which Gandhi has agreed to,” the person said, requesting not to be named.He said the general secretary and office-bearers of UP Congress will report to Kishor, who has also been asked by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to identify a new general secretary in-charge for UP.Kishor, on his part, declined to confirm the development. “I have nothing to say about this. What I will do or not do would become clear in the months to come,” he told ET.Kishor and his team will operate out of the party’s war room at Gurdwara Rakabganj Road in Delhi that he has been already been given charge of, the person cited earlier said.The party has convened a meeting of about 35 leaders from the state on Wednesday to explain Kishor’s mandate for the polls, he said.Congress MLA Rita Bahuguna Joshi said although a core group meeting has been called in Delhi where all senior leaders from the state will be present, she was not aware of Kishor being given charge of the spokesperson Randeep Surjewala also said he was not aware of the appointment. “It is for the topmost leadership to decide.But we have in the past received inputs from him (Kishor) about media strategy,” he said. Kishor’s role will include providing key inputs in candidate selection, apart from election strategy, rallies, publicity campaign, etc. He is said to have sought complete freedom in shaping the party’s campaign without any interference from the state and central leaders.In the run-up to the 2015 Bihar polls, Kishor was credited with focusing on Nitish Kumar’s track record of development and underplaying alliance partner Lalu Prasad, along with coming up with catchy slogans. A person close to Kishor said, “It will be a strenuous exercise.Punjab and UP polls will be held simultaneously, but we are putting together a team of 200 people to work on it. We have already started putting together constituency-wise data in our laptops…all caste permutations and combinations.Past electoral data and issues will be crunched together to decide on strategy for each constituency.”A public health expert by training, Kishor has worked with the United Nations in the past.He was brought in by then CM Modi for the 2012 Gujarat assembly polls. He formed the Citizen’s For Accountable Governance before the 2014 parliamentary polls and through it became one of the most important people handling Modi’s prime ministerial campaign.