Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy unveiled a 206-foot-tall statue of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar at Swarajya Maidan in Vijayawada on January 19, in what is being seen as an attempt to attract the votes of the Scheduled Caste (SC) population in the Assembly and parliamentary elections due later this year.
“This towering statue reflects Ambedkar’s immense contribution to India’s social, economic, political and gender landscapes,” Mr. Reddy said while inaugurating the Statue of Social Justice. “Even a century later, his visionary words echo, steering the nation towards progress. Recognising his enduring principles, our government has woven them into our ‘Navaratnalu’ initiatives,” he added.
The SC community constitutes about 19% of Andhra Pradesh’s population. The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) contested the general elections for the first time in 2014. It won 13 seats from the SC segment out of the total 29 it contested. In 2019, the party won 33 SC and ST seats. In comparison, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) managed to win only one SC seat in 2019. Despite its success with the SC community over the years, the YSCRP is leaving no stone unturned, especially given the alliance between the TDP and the Jana Sena Party.
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While inaugurating the statue, Mr. Reddy said, “Untouchability doesn’t mean mere physical distance but disinterest and unwillingness in hand holding the oppressed people as well. The Opposition’s unwillingness to support the YSRCP government’s endeavours for socio-economic change in society, as perceived by Dr. Ambedkar, was nothing but untouchability in another form,” he said.
There have been several attempts in Andhra Pradesh to garner votes by installing statues. Politics too has been played over the installation of such statues. In 2011, the statue of a Chief Minister of combined Andhra Pradesh, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, was installed near the Police Control Room in Vijayawada. The base of the structure was a replica of the Polavaram Project. The cost of installing the statue was borne by the Rajagopal Foundation, which was then headed by Vijayawada MP from the Congress, Lagadapati Rajagopal. He was one of the participants of the padayatra taken out by Reddy, which is said to have brought the Congress back to power in 2004. In 2015, the statue was removed by the then TDP government, which claimed that it was obstructing traffic. After returning to power, the YSRCP reinstalled the statue.
Earlier, in 1995-96, Rajasekhara Reddy visited Vijayawada as Congress Legislature Party leader to unveil the statue of Congress MLA Vangaveeti Mohana Ranga Rao (Vangaveeti Ranga). Vangaveeti Ranga was seen as a champion of the dominant Kapu community. The cost of installing the statue was borne by his followers in the Congress. However, Vangaveeti Ranga’s widow, Ratnakumari, who was a TDP MLA, opposed this. She even pre-empted Reddy by getting her son Radhakrishna, then a teenager, to unveil the statue. Vangaveeti Ranga’s statues can be seen not just in Vijayawada, but as far as composite East and West Godavari districts. Ranga’s statues are fewer in number in the city compared to those installed in the rural areas of Krishna and Godavari districts.
When N. Chandrababu Naidu planned to install a statue of former Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao on the Godavari ghats, it led to a controversy. Mr. Naidu also planned to construct a 125-feet Ambedkar statue at Amaravati and laid the foundation stone for it in April 2016. The TDP government planned to construct an Ambedkar memorial, comprising a statue, a park, a convention centre, a Buddhist meditation hall, and a library. But when the government changed, the project was shifted to Vijayawada. As sentiments were running high in Amaravati, a statue of Buddha came up overnight in the city soon after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.
Installing statues does not ensure victory, however. In Telangana, for instance, when the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi government installed a statue of Ambedkar in Hyderabad, it did so with much fanfare. But it lost the elections soon after. To compete with the YSRCP, the Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh are now promising to install statues of N.T. Rama Rao across the State, if voted back to power. This, they hope, will fetch them Kamma votes.
