Before the 1989 general elections, a sizeable number of people in Chittoor district used to think that Kuppam, the tail-end tri-State junction flanked by Tamil Nadu in the east and Karnataka in the west was a part of both the neighbouring States. When an employee of any government department gets transferred, it is considered a big punishment to him. Such was the horrible state of backwardness in Kuppam, with no significant roads, water, health facilities or educational institutions. If anyone falls sick or gets injured in a road mishap, his destination used to be Bengaluru or Kolar in Karnataka, which are considerably nearer than the district headquarters, Chittoor.
Under these conditions, incumbent Telugu Desam Party national president N. Chandrababu Naidu contested from here as the TDP candidate when the late N.T. Rama Rao was the party’s president in 1989. However, Mr. Naidu carried the tag of “NTR’s son-in-law”, which brought Kuppam into a sudden limelight, though the TDP won from this tri-State junction in the earlier elections in 1983 and 1985 by-elections. Incredibly, the TDP has never faced defeat in all its elections in this constituency. Since 1989, Mr. Naidu has continued to be the MLA of Kuppam, and the 2024 edition happens to be his eighth time contest.
When Mr. Naidu became the Chief Minister of united Andhra Pradesh in 1985 after the so-called second “August Crisis”, (meaning NTR was unseated from power by his second-in-command Nadendla Bhaskar Rao in August 1984 for the first time; and Mr. Naidu took charge as the Chief Minister on September 1, 1995, after a month-long political drama in August, for the second time), Kuppam was transformed into an “VVIP constituency” overnight. From 1999 till the present 2024 Assembly elections, Mr. Naidu has been following a unique trend — that he would never campaign for himself in Kuppam during the elections, nor even visit the place for filing nomination, while everything would be taken care of by the party cadres. He would just embark on a “Thanksgiving” visit later, each time. During all his contests, Mr. Naidu’s majority counted the most — dangling between 75,000 votes in the 1990s to below 30,000 in the 2019 election, in which he was the lone winner in Chittoor district from Kuppam, losing 13 seats to the YSR Congress Party.
