As the polling day (May 13) draws closer, the campaign clamour grows shriller by the day, with leaders of political parties engaging in no holds barred harangues against each other and social media platforms getting flooded with political powwows.
The main challenge for the incumbent Chief Minister and president of YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy is to get the better of the formidable TDP-JSP-BJP alliance, while the Congress party, headed by his own sister Y.S. Sharmila, has become a cause of added stress to him.
The 2024 election is a momentous battle for the Congress, which is struggling to find a toehold in the political landscape of Andhra Pradesh after a decade-long stasis. Ms. Sharmila, who was recently inducted into the Congress party and made its president in the State, is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Kadapa parliamentary seat on Congress ticket.
The Kadapa Lok Sabha seat, which has been a YSR family pocket borough, has become cynosure of all eyes after Ms. Sharmila entered the poll fray to directly lock horns with her cousin Y.S. Avinash Reddy, also an accused in the murder case of former MP Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy.
As the all-important day draws closer, the State Congress chief, who prefers greeting the voters as ‘YSR bidda’ (YSR’s daughter) is going for Jagan Mohan Reddy with all guns blazing. She has unleashed an unrelenting onslaught against the Chief Minister trying to ‘unmask his double standards’ on various key issues.
‘Nava Sandehalu’, her latest initiative, is a campaign against Mr. Jagan’s ‘Navaratnalu’ programme, wherein she tosses uncomfortable queries related to his unkept promises, demanding his explanation on them. Sources in the party say she has more arrows in her quiver which would get sharper as the polling day gets closer.
The YSRCP chief, who until recently, tacitly limited his criticism of his younger sister by blaming the Opposition for ‘breaking and dividing his family’, showed an outburst of anger on the day he filed his nomination papers in Pulivendula constituency. He went hammer and tongs about Ms. Sharmila’s visit to the TDP president N. Chandrababu Naidu’s house ‘wearing a yellow colour saree’. He accused her of being hand-in-glove with Mr. Naidu and alleged that she had been reading ‘scripts’ given by him in all her public meetings.
An enraged Sharmila hit back at his ‘yellow sari’ jibe and said it was unbecoming of a Chief Minister to comment on the clothing of a woman in a public meeting, especially when she is his own sister.
She dismissed his allegation that she chose to join the Congress ignoring the fact that the party had included their father, the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s name in the CBI chargesheet after his death and said she wanted to set the records straight.
“It is not true that the Congress included my father’s name in the CBI chargesheet. It was in fact Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy who got a petition filed by his lawyer Ponnavolu Sudhakar Reddy in the court to add my father’s name in the disproportionate assets’ cases filed by the CBI,” she said, adding that in return, Mr. Jagan rewarded him with post of the Additional Advocate General.
Ms. Sharmila, along with her cousin Sunitha Narreddy, brought in the public domain certain key factors, which otherwise would have remained under wraps. While a section of people see it as a family feud out in the open, the former insists that “people of Kadapa see this as their personal battle. They acknowledge the role Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and Vivekananda Reddy played in putting an end to faction feuds and bringing peace back.”
The Congress president also jabbed at her political bete noire by trying to hold a mirror to him, quite literally. At a press conference, she said Mr. Jagan had developed a phobia about Chandrababu Naidu. “Anything negative happens in his life, he attributes it to Mr. Naidu,” she said.
But her ‘inordinate focus’ on criticising Mr. Jagan alone has apparently not gone down well with some of her own party seniors, who feel Ms. Sharmila should give equal importance to highlighting key facts about the Congress, which is a centrist party, with its policies predominantly reflecting balanced positions including, secularism, egalitarianism and social stratification.
“This is perhaps the right time to propagate the party ideology and also to pin down the TDP president Chandrababu Naidu on his stand on the issue of reservations for Muslims, now that his party ally BJP has categorically alienated from it,” said one of the party seniors.
