“Narendra Modi is a hardcore terrorist…If you (minorities) vote for Modi, many problems will arise…this Modi brought Triple Talaq Act to put you behind bars…I was the first person who demanded his resignation (after 2002 Gujarat riots)….Most countries banned his entry. After becoming the Prime Minister, he is again trying to attack minorities.” That was then-Andhra Pradesh chief minister and Telugu Desam Party chief Chandrababu Naidu, addressing a rally in Chittoor on 3 April 2019. That was about a year after the TDP broke ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party over special category status to the state.
A couple of weeks after Naidu’s intemperate attack on the Prime Minister, his brother-in-law, N Balakrishna, a TDP MLA, called Modi “gaddar” (traitor) and “namak haram (treacherous)”, adding, “Not just Andhra, entire India is against you. The time has come when they will beat you repeatedly and chase you.”
Balakrishna also happens to be the brother of current Andhra BJP president D Purandeswari.
Think of the level of insult, slander, and calumny TDP leaders were hurling at Prime Minister Modi! I have cited only two examples; there are many, many more. On 9 March, the BJP entered into an alliance with the TDP—and Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party (JSP) in Andhra Pradesh.
Why is it that the BJP felt so compelled to sleep with who had to be its enemy, given their contempt for PM Modi? From friend to frenemy—why did the BJP have to dump an ally like YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, the Andhra CM of the YSR Congress Party? True, Jagan couldn’t have agreed to an alliance with the BJP, given his party’s core constituency of minorities. The BJP can now fancy its chances in half a dozen Lok Sabha seats in Andhra in alliance with the TDP and JSP. But are these seats such a big deal for the BJP to forget insults to PM Modi?
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Chandrababu Naidu, a reliable ally?
Naidu, once a Sanjay Gandhi acolyte, has always been a practical politician without any ideological hang-ups. In 1981, he was cinematography minister in the T Anjaiah-led Congress government. That year, he married matinee idol NT Rama Rao’s daughter, Nara Bhuvaneswari. Andhra Congress chief K Prabhakara Rao, who didn’t get along with Anjaiah, suspended Naidu and C Das, another minister from the Congress, for anti-party activities in the Chittoor Zila Parishad elections. NTR “implored” superstar Amitabh Bachchan, a friend of Rajiv Gandhi, to “prevail upon Congress top brass to bail out his son-in-law”, writes Amar Devulapalli in his book The Deccan Powerplay: Reddy, Naidu and the Realpolitik of Andhra Pradesh.
It also helped that Anjaiah complained to the high command how the state Congress chief suspended his ministers without asking him, the CM. When NTR launched the TDP in 1982, Naidu stayed in the Congress. In the January 1983 elections, NTR stormed to power; Naidu lost the election. “As per an insider account known personally to me, barely two weeks later, on 20 January 1983, Chandrababu Naidu sent a message to his father-in-law…asking to join the TDP and promising to work with dedication and commitment,” says Devulapalli. The author has been candid in declaring that he advises the YSRCP-led Andhra government on national media affairs. You can, therefore, take his claims with a pinch of salt. Twelve years after joining the TDP, Naidu dislodged his father-in-law from power. Soon, he was the United Front convenor before supporting the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998. He left the NDA after the 2004 election drubbing, saying that the alliance had hurt his party’s secular image and alienated minorities. In 2014, when Modi came to the national political centre stage, the TDP was the first regional party to join the NDA. In 2018, he quit the NDA only to be back on Saturday after six years.
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Why BJP dumped Jagan to embrace Naidu
If Naidu is such an unreliable ally, why has the BJP embraced him? The TDP chief was desperate, for sure. With the Jagan Mohan Reddy-led government going after him in alleged scams, he needed an ally. He knows he could win elections only with the BJP’s backing—it happened in 1999 and 2014. The alliance failed in the 2004 elections, but the TDP and the BJP were facing double anti-incumbency then. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election in undivided Andhra, the TDP won 29 and the BJP seven out of the total 42 seats. In 2014, in Telangana-less Andhra, in an alliance with the TDP and backing from the JSP, the BJP won 2 Lok Sabha seats with a vote share of over 7 per cent; it came down to less than one per cent in 2019. Obviously, going solo in the 2024 Lok Sabha election would mean withdrawal from the Andhra electoral race.
Would the two, three, or four Lok Sabha seats that the BJP may end up winning in Andhra, if at all, be worth sacrificing a friend like Jagan? Probably not. But here is the thing. What if Jagan were to lose? Think of that scenario. Why have another hostile opposition-led government in Andhra? Especially when the TDP and the JSP were willingly ceding more political space to the BJP — at their own cost in the long run. Even if the BJP’s allies fail miserably, what the heck!
Jagan won’t go anywhere. It’s not just about all those pending cases with agencies. He has been on bail, granted by a special CBI court, in a disproportionate assets case for over a decade. His detractors have gone to higher courts to get it cancelled. Just think about who can help him.
Jagan, who had a bitter parting with the Gandhis, must find the BJP a natural ally with a common adversary. For the BJP’s chief strategist Amit Shah, there was also a lesson from the past—in 2004, Vajpayee bet on the ruling party in Andhra, the TDP, despite 10 years of anti-incumbency in the state.
Why Jagan won’t mind BJP’s decision
Jagan may be a bit disappointed that the BJP has gone with his principal adversary. PM Modi standing with the opposition makes it difficult for him in terms of both chemistry and arithmetic. In 2019, the YSRCP got around 50 per cent votes in both Lok Sabha and assembly elections. Contesting separately, the TDP got 40 per cent votes, the JSP around 6 per cent, and the BJP close to 1 per cent—totalling 47 per cent. Very close, wasn’t it? Voteshares of these three parties totalled around 46 per cent in the assembly elections, too.
Let’s look at the data when Jagan’s adversaries were together. In 2014, when the BJP and the TDP contested in alliance and the newly formed JSP backed them, their combined total was around 48 per cent of votes. The TDP and the YSRCP secured 41 and 46 per cent votes each. The TDP ended up with 15 Lok Sabha seats and the YSRCP 8. In the assembly election, there was hardly any difference in voteshare, with both parties getting 45 per cent votes each.
Now that the BJP, the TDP, and the JSP are officially together, Jagan has reasons to worry. “Muslims and Christians constitute barely 11 per cent of the Andhra population, officially. The fact is that the total minority population is over 20 per cent in the state because many Dalits who have converted to Christianity don’t show it officially. If the BJP aligns with the opposition, this big chunk will come to our party in toto,” a YSRCP MP told me last month. CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey in 2019 showed that the Muslims in Andhra were almost equally split between the TDP and the YSRCP — 46 and 49 per cent respectively.
It also showed that farmers, Dalits, and tribals favoured the YSRCP. Jagan has retained that rural votebank while the middle class is uneasy, another YSRCP leader told me. Many YSRCP leaders also concede that arresting Naidu in the skill development scam was a “mistake”.
That, apparently, galvanised the TDP cadres and added to anti-incumbency.
Jagan seems to have learnt lessons from K Chandrasekhar Rao in Telangana. KCR and Jagan were facing the same problem—perception of aloofness from the common people and anti-incumbency against legislators. Both CMs were inaccessible, not just to the common people but also to party leaders and workers. Like KCR, Jagan also doesn’t want to be interviewed by any publication other than Sakshi, his own channel. Their chief ministerial residences became a fortress few outside their coteries could breach.
But that’s where Jagan seems to have learnt lessons from KCR. Telangana’s ruling party leaders had told me ahead of assembly elections that the people were upset with at least a third of his MLAs. KCR was “overconfident”. He didn’t replace the MLAs to deny the opposition an opportunity to ‘poach’ established leaders. While Jagan remains inaccessible, he is taking feedback about MLAs and MPs more seriously. His decision to deny tickets to sitting legislators has already resulted in about half a dozen MPs quitting the party. His government has also been much better than the KCR’s in terms of implementing welfare schemes and deliveries on the ground.
Jagan must be disappointed about Modi-Shah turning from friends into frenemies. But a smart politician that he is, he can’t miss the silver lining.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)