HYDERABAD: She was barely a 10-year-old when her uncle took her to the air show at Begumpet airport, where the then Chief Minister was also present. Her uncle made her sit on his shoulders so that she could get a glimpse of him. Although, she could only catch a glimpse, the image of how a CM looks was well documented in her mind. He lost the elections when she was in Class IX. She innocently asked her dad if they would be asked to leave the state because her leader lost the elections. Her father explained to her how the government and election pattern functions.
She grew up among politically intellectual people. The conferring of politics and other current affairs at the dinner table made her choose news as her best friend. She grew up to be a journalist and eventually evolved into a communication consultant. Today, Tejaswini Pagadala is the youngest political biographer with her first book itself on her leader, Nara Chandrababu Naidu. The book pieces together his life journey that runs parallel to that of the formation and division of Andhra Pradesh. The formal launch of the book took place on January 27 in Hyderabad, followed by a panel discussion with former DGP of united AP HJ Dora, Cyient Founder BVR Mohan Reddy, and senior journalist Nagesh Kumar. Her 152-page book titled Chandrababu Naidu – India’s Glocal Leader costs `499.
journey as a journalist
Tejaswini, the IIJNM bred, is now an independent communications consultant who started her journalism career with the major newspapers and later she became a freelancer for international news organisations. Her forte is political reporting, business reporting, development reporting and rural/human rights reporting. “From June 2014, I was freelancing for Al Jazeera as a their south India correspondent. I was also freelancing for long-form writing. I wrote several stories when the bifurcation happened. I was also doing a story on the bifurcation blues and loan waivers in Andhra Pradesh. That was the time, Chandrababu Naidu declared waiving off farmers loans as part of his manifesto.
The article got published within a week of his oath. I was also working with another Asian correspondent of Christian Science Monitor. He was working on a story trying to look into similarities between Modi and Chandrababu Naidu and their governments, because NDA had its rule at centre and TDP at state. I contributed to the story,” she shares about her journalistic stint. She has also won the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2013 in the Southern Region for the best web feature titled “When laws betray children” – an analytical piece on the contradictions in the laws related to child marriages.
Stint as a Communications Officer
Just when she was looking for exploring newer horizons in her career, a senior journalist asked her to try her luck with the new communications team of the Andhra Pradesh government as they were in search of a social media savvy candidate. Says Tejaswini, “I got Parakala Prabhakar’s contact, communications advisor for the government. I went to meet him, not sure of bagging it.
They had made a thorough research on me. Shortly after a chat, I was taken aback when they asked me to join immediately. He told me, the job was not just social media, but everything related to communications like writing press releases and manage his accounts. I was the only one handling English national and international writings of the CM and any sort of English communication that went from CM office. I also wrote publications for the Government and liaised with other departments for policy research and communication.”
Discovering the CM
With protocols and trust factors involved in CM’s office, Tejaswini was not allowed to meet him. Nevertheless, she ensured, she peeped through to get a glimpse of him. Finally after they moved to Secretariat, she got an opportunity to meet him and sit in the review meetings every day. It was during this time, she got to observe him closely. Her attention to details about him and his ideologies made her realise that she had a distorted view about him when she was just a journalist. “There was unnecessary negative propaganda about him as a politician. This was because his core messages were misinterpreted and misrepresented outside,” she shares. That’s when it occured to Tejaswini that there was a need to put out his real story to the world.
Her tenure in CM office
In the process, she also had the opportunity to handle the HudHud cyclone campaign from the government side. “We were able to mobilise offline support by using social media effectively. We saw how efficiently he could rise to the occasion. There were many rescue teams and we were also involved in the team. We airlifted 200 kids who were stuck in the cyclone. And generally one doesn’t get into crisis management, when one is in communication role which I luckily got to do. Later my role expanded to coordinate with multiple departments, sometimes it included policy research , even make features for the governor for Republic Day.
It was a great exposure for me. I started enjoying and I discovered my interest in policymaking since I had done a lot of stories when I was working as a journalist and while working on stories of child and women’s rights, I got to know a lot of laws and basically flaws in laws,” says the girl, who sacrificed her social life and worked for 15 hours a day.
“There were lot of clauses in the related laws which actually would lead to multiple flaws within the system. I could figure out why certain things did not work out in government. I was not supposed to give my opinion directly, but then I was able to understand where the flaw was and where the government failed. But one unique thing about the CM was that he was open to listening to anyone irrespective of their age and experience. He would also ask us to express the ideas. If it seemed apt to him, he would act upon, otherwise he would just listen,” she shares about Chandrababu.
Moving to Vijayawada
In her words, “We had to shift to Vijayawada, which was a different camp office altogether. Earlier, we used to sit on the lounge with our laptops and wifi, including the CM. All the secretaries, principal secretaries, chief secretaries would be crammed into the room and be eating together. Again it was like back to square one in Vijayawada. These experiences gave me perspective of the aftermath of bifurcation.”
She wondered, “So how does a person who has nothing, build everything?” But he proved to be a great inspiration to her. She shares further, “I was also given the capital campaign. I was also privy to discussions, every discussion including the one-on-one meetings with the CM in hotels . There was only one media person and that was me, hence obviously I had to withhold a few important things that shouldn’t go to the media. That introduced me to what could be a controversy. That’s when I limited myself to giving information to the media.
There came the capital formation. I did the campaign, Mana Amaravati Mana Rajadhani. I wrote Mana Amaravati Mana Rajadhani with a hashtag on the slate and asked people to pose like that and show their support for the capital. The slate indicted starting from a clean state. He liked it and the next day posted it. The campaign went viral. We wanted it to trend for two days and it happened. In the process, I could see how the capital formation comprised many things including the minutest of land records, court cases etc. I witnessed those challenges personally.”
The biography
“It is exactly 40 years of Nara Chandrababu Naidu’s entry into politics and 68 since his birth, but no biography of him has yet been written. There is very little known about his childhood and I tried to capture that. Evidently there is a lot of information about his childhood, capacities and capabilities which not many people might know and I focused on that point. He is a politician and obviously has his own political agendas. Even with such agendas, how do you take forward good governance, that is what this book is all about. It is about how India wouldn’t have been what India is today, if not for his power reforms, telecom reforms, IT reforms. There is a lot of opposition that he didn’t focus on agriculture, which is not true. During his term, he had introduced the mobile rythu bazaars and eliminated the middlemen hassle,” she adds.
“Not only agricultural production, he also increased horticulture production etc. This was evident that he not only focused on food crops but also fruits and vegetables. He developed the agricultural output, but unfortunately nature played its role in bringing drought. There were two consecutive droughts and he couldn’t have avoided it anyway. It was the time when he didn’t understand the people‘s perceptions. This miscommunication has brought a lot of negativity to him. That was one of the pitfalls,” narrates the author, who proved that only grey hair does not fathom politics. In this process, she went to his hometown Naravaripalli, met his sister and family members. She talked to his college friends and also people, who worked with him within the government and outside. She approached Bloomsbury Publishing, who have been looking for the biography on Chandrababu Naidu. This book aims at projecting him as India’s glocal leader.
— Purnima Sriram
purnima@newindianexpress.com
@iyer_purnima