The year 2023, being the penultimate year before the general and Assembly elections, saw hectic political activity in Andhra Pradesh. It was marked with padayatras and bus yatras by various political parties, change of guard in a few political parties, arrest of senior leaders, including former Chief Minister and TDP’s national president N. Chandrababu Naidu, A.P. CID filing cases against a number of leaders in the Opposition and the signing of the formal alliance between the JSP and the TDP to take on the might of Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party.
All these developments are expected to culminate into a heady political cocktail for the 2024 elections, and A.P. would be the State to be watched by the poll analysts.
With just a few months to go for the polls, every political party in the State is busy giving final touches to their campaign and strategies.
Bold move
The State experienced a tense political situation, when the CID arrested former CM Nara Chandrababu Naidu on September 9, for his alleged involvement in the ₹371 crore A.P. Skill Development scam and sent him to judicial remand at the Rajahmundry Central Prison. He was arrested at Nandyala town when he was on his ‘Babu Surety — Bhavishyathuku Guarantee’ campaign trail.
It took almost two months for him to come out on a conditional bail on health grounds after hectic legal battles both at the A.P. High Court and the Supreme Court by top legal counsels from both sides, and finally, he could get a regular bail from the High Court.
The CID also made him an accused in a number of other cases such as the IRR (Inner Ring Road) alignment case of Amaravati, sand mining case and liquor case.
But the boldest political move during the period when Mr. Naidu was in jail, was taken by Jana Sena Party president Pawan Kalyan. Despite being in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he announced the alliance with the TDP, after meeting Mr. Naidu in jail in one of the ‘mulaqat’ episodes.
This changed the political landscape in A.P., and the alliance has now been formally cemented with both Mr. Pawan and Mr. Naidu, participating in the concluding public meeting of Nara Lokesh’s Yuva Galam padayatra recently.
Both parties have joined hands, as they had done in 2014, with the main idea to see that the anti-YSR Congress Party votes does not get split and both the leaders were vocal about it.
The year began with TDP’s general secretary Nara Lokesh starting his poll campaign with Yuva Galam in January. He concluded his over 200 days of padayatra covering over 3,000 km across all the districts on December 20, and it culminated with a massive public meeting at Polipalli in Vizianagaram district.
To counter Lokesh’s padayatra and Naidu’s ‘Babu Surety — Bhavishyathuku Guarantee’ programmes, the YSR Congress started its own bus yatra titled as ‘Samajika Sadhikara yatra’ covering the entire State to highlight its welfare schemes.
Mr. Pawan Kalyan launched his own bus yatra called ‘Varahi’, and has covered quite a few districts already and is expected to cover all the districts in the next few months.
Mr. Pawan has been vehemently critical of Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy and quite a few times he had made some hard-hitting controversial statements. But it is still unclear whether the BJP will continue to support the JSP and if it does, then it will be a repeat of the alliance of 2014 that had TDP-JSP-BJP taking on Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP.
Change of guard in BJP
Meanwhile, the BJP also made a series of leadership changes in the State. The party high command replaced its senior leader Somu Veerraju with Daggubati Purandeswari as the party State president. This change, a few months before the election, is seen as a strategic move as Purandeswari is the daughter of N.T. Rama Rao (NTR), the founder of the TDP.
After losing badly in the 2019 elections, TDP leaders claim that they are back on the winning track after winning three MLC seats this year.
With political activity picking up by the year end, it looks like the stage is set for a mega showdown between the TDP-JSP combine and the YSRCP, in the elections in 2024.
