Gali Nagaraja
Amaravati: Reel life and real life are seldom in sync with each other. Especially, the arena of politics is altogether a different ball game. Power star Pawan Kalyan seems failing to get wind of these tricks of the trade. The actor’s latest hiccup in honeymooning with the BJP in Andhra Pradesh is a grim pointer to his flop shows in politics.
Pawan, after his Jana Sena Party’s electoral fiasco in the elections in 2019, took a U-turn from the left to the right by forging an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The fight for retaining the capital in Amaravati remained a guiding principle of the alliance. In the meantime, the actor accordingly got out of his Che Guevara costumes to embrace the icons of saffron politics.
But the missile from Gabbar Singh’s artillery misfired when his ally backed out on the question of the capital in Amaravati.
The newly appointed president of the state BJP Somu Veerraju said that the location of the capital is the business of the state government and that his party has no role whatsoever in the matter. Soon, came the bills relating to shifting of executive capital to Visakhapatnam from Amaravati with the Governor’s assent. Veerraju was one of the signatories of the common minimum programme devised between the BJP and the JSP at the time of alliance. With the strength of this common understanding, Pawan kept reassuring the striking farmers in Amaravati, saying he would lobby with the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre against shifting of capital by the Jaganmohan Reddy government.
A misguided soul
The 52-year old Pawan Kalyan looks nonplussed in spotting trusted friends to jell with and lacks consistency to take his alliances to their logical end. After the experiment of his brother and megastar Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam Party failed in the 2009 elections, Kalyan turnd Agnatavasi, spending hibernated political life up to the elections in 2014. With his fledgling Jana Sena Party Pawan Kalyan resurfaced in politics campaigning for the victory of BJP’s Narendra Modi in that election on the commitment given by the latter on special category status for the bifurcated Andhra Pradesh. His alliance with the BJP broke up after the NDA government denied the special status, forcing the actor to stitch up an alliance with the left parties in the general elections in 2019. But the alliance failed to save him from an ignominious defeat. Pawan Kalyan failed to win any of the two Assembly constituencies which he contested in West Godavari and Visakhapatnam districts. With this, the story for the actor-turned leader is back to the square one. Pawan Kalyan is back to the BJP fold on a different plank i.e. the capital at Amaravati only.
Veerraju, after his elevation as the AP’s BJP chief, said the question on who will be the Chief Ministerial candidate of the BJP-JSP combine will be answered after the outcome of the 2024 elections.
Eying Kapus
That the BJP is eying Kapus, a dominant electoral segment next to BCs and SCs in the coastal region is evident with its alliance with the JSP headed by Pawan Kalyan and its selection of leaders to head its state unit for two successive terms since 2014. JSP’s Pawan Kalyan, Kanna Lakshminarayana, the outgoing president of the state BJP and his successor Veerraju, belong to the Kapu community. After the experiment of Chiru as megastar is called by film buffs, it is a million-dollar question on the success of the latest Kapu experiment under the banner of the BJP-JSP. The failure of Chiranjeevi and another Kapu icon Mudragada Padmanabham in politics is attributed to the inability of the community to sail with the predominant BCs in their home turfs.