Hyderabad, May 15: Jagan Mohan Reddy’s victory by 5.47 lakh votes in the Kadapa byelection has left the ruling Congress shell-shocked in AP. Although the outcome was widely anticipated, the margin of victory broke like a clap of thunder over the state.
While Congress leaders insist they anticipated the defeat, so what’s the big deal, the margin and manner of victory have put paid to the Congress’ hopes of ever wresting the legacy of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy from the grasp of his son. But even more worrisome to them is the fact that Jagan pitched the by-poll as a contest between Sonia Gandhi and his father, and Madam came up a distant second in the hearts of Kadapa voters.
Jagan Mohan fought the by-poll on the slogan of self-respect vs arrogance. The self-respect he arrogated to himself, and the arrogance he pinned on the Congress high command. The young leader’s spiel boiled down to this: Just a year after the death of YSR, his son and mother were hounded out of the Congress, his family was divided by bribing his brother Y S Vivekananda Reddy with a ministry, and the late benefactor’s welfare programmes were thrown out.
This emotional packaging of a political message went down well with the Kadapa voter. Amidst the exultation of the Jagan camp on Friday, one elderly voter said in Vempalle, “They tried to harass a fatherless child.’’
The Congress and the TDP strategy in the by-poll was to paint Jagan Mohan Reddy as a power-hungry dynast who was in a hurry to chief minister.
That line of attack received no traction and inevitably begged the question why that description should not fit Rahul Gandhi as well. The Congress went into the election with the aim of competing for the legacy of YSR, but its tactics were all askew. First, it fielded D L Ravindra Reddy, an arch enemy of YSR, against Jagan, and tutored him to say nice things about the late chief minister.
Secondly, half the cabinet was in Kadapa peddling a difficult slogan: YSR was a good samaritan, but he was what he was because of Sonia.
The party was begging for some second-hand credit and was not indulged.
The Kadapa returns leave the Congress as the biggest loser of a limited skirmish.
After Friday’s thrashing, Sonia Gandhi’s apologists in the state Congress were quick at work to divert attention away from the fact that ‘the boy’ had taken Sonia Gandhi head on and won round one. While the chief minister, who likened Jagan’s victory to the upsurge of milk on the boil — meaning that it will subside just as quickly – will cop the blame, the state government has the unhappy task of limping along to the next challenge.
Political observers say neither Jagan Mohan Reddy nor Chandrababu Naidu will move to kill off the Congress government in the immediate future, entirely due to calculations that have little to do with public opinion.
The new Kadapa MP has the expressed support of about 25 MLAs in the Congress, but should he move a no-trust motion, the TDP is certain to keep away from the vote at this juncture. The TDP now sees Jagan’s YSR Congress party as a competitor for anti-incumbency votes, and so will not do anything before it is sure that the cards will fall in its favour.
The loss to the TDP is not as much as to the Congress.
However, Chandrababu Naidu’s party is not stably poised at the moment to make use of present opportunities.
The TDP boss’s relations with the family of N T Rama Rao are strained but he is secure in the knowledge that the party cadres and second-rung leadership will sail with him. That equilibrium can only change if the Congress uses its Union minister D Purandeshwari, daughter of NTR, to rally her siblings around and range them against Naidu.
Of more serious concern to Naidu is the revolt within the Telangana component of TDP MLAs. Some of them led by N Janardhan Reddy have been straining at the leash and pressing Naidu to declare himself more firmly for a separate Telangana.
Any such move, however, will have a blowback for Naidu in coastal Andhra and wipe him out of Rayalaseema, his and Jagan Mohan’s home region, where the anti-Telangana sentiment is fiercest. To cope with these conflicting considerations, Naidu has adopted a pehle-aap approach to the Congress, waiting for the grand old party to make the first move. In the post-Kadapa scenario too, Naidu is likely to wait for the Congress to finish performing its harakiri.
However, while on the face of it, the Congress seems to have no aces, it does have a game-changer card: the decision- making power on the Telangana issue. With the TDP utterly marginalised in Telangana, and Jagan Mohan remembered as the man who waved a Samaikya Andhra flag in Parliament, it can play the card to queer the pitch for both of them.
–Agencies