Disheartened TDP relies on Pawan Kalyan for political resurgence .The TDP has been pleading for an alliance, but the BJP is keeping its options open despite the fact that the southern state’s assembly elections are six months away.
The Andhra Pradesh political landscape is still unclear, as the BJP has not chosen which ally or allies it will work with to win the state’s assembly elections in 2024, which will take place concurrently with the Lok Sabha election. The opposition TDP-Jana Sena coalition as well as the ruling YSRCP led by Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy are courting the party, but it has kept its cards close to its vest.
But the TDP, one of the BJP’s key suitors, appears to be giving up on forging an alliance with the party and has voiced its concern. Party chief Chandrababu Naidu has been held in detention for 25 days, but TDP state president and former minister Kinjarapu Atchannaidu has expressed doubts that the arrest was carried out without the knowledge or consent of the Center.
The TDP leadership and cadre believe that Jagan could not have decided to pursue Naidu without approval from the Center, and Atchannaidu, who is well-known to be close to the TDP supremo, appears to have expressed this view. Their concern that Jagan would obtain permission from the Centre to keep Naidu imprisoned by entwining him in numerous cases has been reinforced by Jagan’s travel to Delhi to visit the prime minister. They are confident that even if the TDP chief is granted bail in the Supreme Court’s Skill Development case, he will still be detained in some other matter.
The media baron will mediate?
With Nara Lokesh, the son of Naidu, failing to meet with senior BJP leaders although camped out in Delhi for the past three weeks, the TDP leaders’ suspicions that the BJP is hostile to their party appeared to have been validated.
According to rumors going around Hyderabad, Naidu has urged a media mogul who also happens to be a member of Naidu’s Kamma caste to speak out for the TDP before the prime minister as a last ditch effort. A number of cases brought by the Jagan administration have targeted the media mogul.
Actor-politician Pawan Kalyan has often stated recently that his group, the Jana Sena Party (JSP), would stay in partnership regardless of whether the BJP agrees with the two-party alliance, which has been the only source of comfort for the TDP during these difficult times.Disheartened TDP relies on Pawan Kalyan for political resurgence.
Even some TDP members are considering forming a coalition with Left-leaning parties. They contend that even though the Left and BJP each received less than 1% of the vote in the previous election, they would lend a pro-people gloss to the TDP-JSP alliance. A pro-TDP intellectual based in Anantapur claims that the alliance with the BJP may have ultimately cost the TDP any support it may have had among minorities, while the alliance with the Left, which would also be less demanding in terms of seats, may have opened the door for the Opposition INDIA alliance.
Pawan Kalyan, who frequently has him photographed wearing a Che Guevara cap, emits a vaguely Leftish, populist-liberal image. Last time, his collaboration with the Left was not particularly beneficial. He would not oppose if the Left was included in the two-party coalition.
the BJP being evasive
In a state where it hardly has any representation, the BJP is assessing its options. In order to maximize its gains in both the Assembly and the Lok Sabha elections, it must choose an alliance. The main reason the BJP is appealing to the three regional parties in Andhra Pradesh, the YSRCP, TDP, and Jana Sena, is that it is currently in power at the federal level, where it can lavish financial favors on its alliance partner, bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma to the table, and punish its opponents by using federal agencies to look into their transgressions.
The BJP’s poor electoral performance in the state is consistent with its weak presence there. In an alliance with the TDP, the BJP gained three seats in the 2014 Assembly elections. However, when the TDP left the partnership in 2019, the BJP lost those seats. With 151 of the 175 Assembly seats won by the YSRCP, the TDP only received 23, losing power to the YSRCP by 79 seats. Out of the 137 seats it ran for, the Jana Sena, which is now a TDP ally, only won one, and the BJP, which ran for 173 seats, came up empty.
More significantly, in the most recent Assembly elections, the YSRCP received a staggering 49.95% of the vote, while the TDP received 39.17%. In relation to the 137 seats it ran for, the Jana Sena, which ran in coalition with the Left parties, received 5.53% of the vote. Due to the TDP, the BJP not only lost the three seats it had gained in 2014, but it also received less than 1% of the vote, or just 0.89%.
TDP regrets the break.
When Andhra Pradesh lost its main source of income—the capital city of Hyderabad—to Telangana as a result of the state’s split, Naidu parted with the NDA one year before the 2019 Assembly elections, accusing the Centre of refusing to grant his demand for Special Category status for the state.
Naidu was persuaded that parting ways with the BJP was a mistake after his defeat in the previous election and subsequent by-election defeats, along with the Jagan government’s retaliatory moves. Since then, he has made an effort to patch things up with the BJP by blaming the Centre for not responding to his request for the Special Category. He has praised Modi highly and called him a “visionary” in earlier statements.
But the BJP still remembers his slight. The fact that Naidu had done so twice before—the first time just after the 2004 elections, which he lost—must not be forgotten. The BJP wants to teach Naidu a lesson because it views him as unreliable and thinks he maintains connections with regional parties that are not BJP members.
But more crucially, insiders claim that the BJP wants to make a tough deal with whichever party or parties it may ultimately decide to unite with. The majority of safe Assembly seats, as well as the majority of Lok Sabha seats, would be demanded by the national party. Alternately, it would even prefer to forego its demand for a sizable piece of the Assembly’s overall pie in exchange for Lok Sabha seats, which are more crucial to it.
