The drubbing received by the Nara Chandrababu Naidu in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly and Lok Sabha elections at the hands of the YSR-Congress is a clear signal of the sun setting on his political career..
After a long innings of over four decades, the 69-year-old sweated it out against the young YS Jaganmohan Reddy, but failed to win a positive electoral verdict.
In Naidu’s case, strangely, history has also repeated itself. Naidu had lost out to Jagan’s father YS Rajasekhara Reddy in the 2004 Assembly polls as well.
This perhaps make him the first Chief Minister to have been defeated by a father and son duo. . Interestingly, Naidu has also faltered in the very first election that he fought completely on his own.
Survival in question
Once hailed as a kingmaker, a poster boy of the World Bank and as the man who reimagined Hyderabad with its IT hubs and modern infrastructure, Naidu’s fall has been rather dramatic.
Cutting his teeth in the rough and tumble of politics with the Cong(I) in 1978, Naidu served as a Minister in T Anjaiah’s Congress government. He shifted to the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) after his father-in-law NT Rama Rao rode to power in 1983. He later became the General Secretary, and in 1995, staged a coup to grab power and control of the party from NTR.
In 2019, Naidu was hoping for a repeat of the 1996-2004 period, when he and the TDP directed national politics — from choosing Prime Ministers like Deve Gowda and IK Gujral under the United Front banner and providing stability to the NDA under Vajpayee — and extracted the best for Andhra Pradesh.
Choice of allies
However, his political career graph has plummeted in the recent years. His attempts to return to power by allying with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the Left came a cropper each time. His opposition to the bifurcation of AP did not yield the desired results as the State was split in 2014.
However, Narendra Modi and the BJP helped him win the elections in 2014. This euphoria proved short-lived, as his ambitions and missteps ended up in him leaving the NDA and attracting the wrath of Modi and Shah.
In 2004, Naidu was blinded by the ‘India shining’ campaign of Vajpayee, and lost out on the ground-level aspirations of voters in AP. In 2019 as well, Naidu seems to have misread the aspirations of the people of a bifurcated AP and tried to push his grandiose vision instead of meeting their immediate wants.
Alas, his obsession with selling big dreams of Amaravati, the route to making AP the top State, and the desire to make his son Nara Lokesh his successor, allowed corruption in government. The failure to read YS Jagan finally did him in. He harped on Hyderabad, and stuck his neck out with an ‘unholy’ alliance with the Cong(I) in the Telangana Assembly elections of December 2018.
2019 performance
K Chandrasekhar Rao, Chief Minister of Telangana and TRS supremo, seized the opportunity and turned the tables on Naidu by raking up the Telangana sentiment. The result was the near shutout of the TDP in Telangana. A victorious KCR had then said: “I will give Naidu a return gift in AP polls in 2019.”
Truly, the debacle suffered by Naidu has the markings of KCR, as he advised and supported YS Jagan. The BJP also pitched in with its strategy to cut Naidu to size.
Naidu also misread the ground reality. While the poor wanted their basic needs such as healthcare, women’s security etc met, he promised laptops, big industries and Japanese, Chinese and US investments.
However, Naidu, the most adaptable political leader, with governance and survival skills, should be credited with building the TDP . His efforts to attract the global biggies in IT and new economy to Hyderabad, along with the infrastructure he envisioned and the risks he took in electronic, online and data management in governance are remarkable.