HYDERABAD: After Nandyal and Kakinada, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has come out with a template for reaping a rich harvest of votes in elections in 2019. And he gave the secret away. It is poll, political and people’s management - three Ps or simply PPP. Having vanquished YSRC chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy decisively in both the polls, Naidu has already rolled up his sleeves to implement it to do an encore on a larger scale in the next general elections.
As for the poll management, he is training his partymen to keep a watchful eye at micro-level of the electoral process since this is where the secret for success lies. Having fought quite a number of elections, he knows how to do it and he passed on his knowledge to his partymen to be prepared to sew up loose ends if any at the booth level. Naidu had brought in thousands of TDP workers to Nandyal and succeeded in making them build a rapport with the voters. Then their work was supervised locally and from the command control centre in Amaravati, the work of the ministers and MLAs was monitored. “This kind of intensive monitoring of elections, particularly for a byelection to an obscure Assembly seat like Nandyal is unheard of. This is where Naidu scored and Jagan Mohan Reddy has faltered,” says an analyst.
For political management, Naidu, in about a week or 10 days, is likely to reconstitute his party State committee. Already the process has begun with the party functionaries getting inputs from districts on leaders who could be accommodated in the State committee. As this committee is likely to be the last before the next elections, extreme care is being taken to ensure proper representation to castes that matter most in the elections. “It would be a harmonious mix of castes, religions and regions to work as a well-oiled machine to reach the target,” says one TDP leader.
As for the people’s management, he is asking his partymen to adopt at least 25 people in their neighbourhood and keep interacting with them on a regular basis. This way, they would be drawn closer to the Telugu Desam ideology. Christened Intintiki TDP, the mammoth programme will be rolled out on Monday.
The interesting part of people’s management is that the party workers would not only keep in touch with the voters but would find out what their individual and community needs are and prepare a list. The party workers would remind the voters how the government is caring for them and then send the feedback to the party headquarters through an app which is under construction now.
At the State level, Naidu is there with his People First initiative which he believes has paid rich dividends in his Nandyal and Kakinada forays. In Nandyal, since he had ample time, he used the People First call centre and is understood to have communicated with 1.6 lakh voters. In the People First initiative, the party leader would know what the problems the people were facing, what they wanted and what intervention is required and at what level to get the benefits that the State is offering them.
What has come as heart-warming for Naidu after Nandyal and Kakinada was that people’s trust in him has not shaken. The YSRC was hoping that anti-incumbency was building and it would manifest in the results.
The YSRC wanted to exploit this anti-incumbency to its advantage. But with the results coming out in TDP’s favour, Naidu has become very aggressive. TDP general secretary Nara Lokesh’s assertion that the party would win all the 175 seats, including Pulivendula represented in the Assembly now by Jagan Mohan Reddy in 2019, is an indication of this new gush of enthusiasm. “We will win all seats. The YSRC is down and out,” he says, adding that henceforth the party would concentrate on the voters attached to all the 42,250 booths in the State to reach the target.
Naidu is understood to have shared with his party leaders that his work in the area of developing infrastructure and implementation of welfare scheme had held him in good stead. But those who watched both the elections had come to the conclusion that it was more the “poll and people’s management” that had helped him though his hard work too might have cut some ice with the people.
As Naidu adopts a scientific approach, desisting from personal attack on Jagan Mohan Reddy and addressing the issues of people through real time governance to face the 2019 electoral challenge, the BJP, his ally, is watching him from a distance with growing curiosity. Immediately after Naidu won Nandyal, BJP chief Amit Shah had said the friendship with TDP will continue.
His reassertion of faith in TDP is believed to be a sneak-peek into Amit Shah’s mind on BJP’s future line of action vis-a-vis TDP. The decibel levels of BJP leaders too have come down as far as lashing out at the TDP is concerned. They are exercising more caution which might be turn out to be an advantage to the TDP.
R Prithvi Raj Assistant Resident Editor, Vijayawada raj@newIndianexpress.com