By 11 am on May 11, 2004, Nara Chandrababu Naidu, described fondly by a friendly media as CEO, IT czar and a visionary, was in isolation at his deserted Jubilee Hills residence in Hyderabad.
Trends indicated he was losing badly and the Telugu Desam Party eventually ended up with just 47 out of 294 seats, its worst electoral performance after NTR founded it in 1982.
“I had worked day and night to put Hyderabad on the global map of IT capitals and the tech crowd was busy watching cricket!” he rued.
The TDP’s performance in the capital city was as dismal as elsewhere. In opposition for 10 long years, and back in power for five years from 2014, this time in divided Andhra Pradesh, he did an encore: winning 23 of the 175 Assembly seats in 2019.
A massive anti-incumbency wave brought Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy to power. Learning and unlearning are important to politicians. But Naidu didn’t or, perhaps, couldn’t as a pliable media once again created grand images of the man over his plan to build a mega capital city at Amaravati, the heartland of Kammas, the socially, politically and financially powerful community.
His post-defeat comment remained the same—people are ungrateful though he toiled hard to develop Andhra Pradesh. Work hard he did, but that was essentially to preserve power in the hands of his clan, by making them financially more powerful.
Known for his penchant for grandiose programmes lacking in substance, and vision documents sans vision (back in the 1990s, he came up with Vision 2020 though none can blame him for the mess we are in this year), he touted Amaravati as a People’s Capital.
It was anything but that. An expert committee set up by the Centre to identify the new capital made some sane observations: a) it’s shortsighted policy to take away 30,000 plus acres of fertile land from the rice bowl of Andhra; b) the challenge was to create three lakh new jobs every year; precious fiscal resources should go into public investments in agriculture and other areas instead of building a brick-and-mortar capital city; c) Naidu should look at balanced development of the entire state, not just the Vijayawada-Guntur belt. But none of this mattered as the intention was to benefit absentee landlords and real estate developers. The project turned out to be a sham from the beginning.
Close to Rs 6,000 crore has been spent on interim buildings and the entire project was estimated to cost upwards of Rs 1 lakh crore, which meant debt servicing alone required Rs 8,000-10,000 crore a year, according to some estimates.
None expected the “dream merchants” of Amaravati to succeed and any hopes the lobby had were shattered last week when the Governor gave his assent to the three-capital concept proposed by the Jagan government—Visakhapatnam as the executive (administrative capital), Amaravati the seat of legislature and Kurnool the judicial capital.
The existing buildings in the three cities should suffice for the stated purposes. In a state essentially comprising three regions with diverse history and classes/castes, this is perhaps the best way forward. At a time when urban sustainability, as also climate change, is a growing concern across the globe, building a megapolis is at best a sign of a megalomaniac, who looks for his name to be etched in the sands of time.
Just as every policy has a political strategy, Jagan’s too is obviously intended to prevent consolidation of the Telugu Desam and, if possible, diminish it by the destruction of speculative money that has already flown into Amaravati.
The plan, however, could boomerang unless he goes for total decentralisation as suggested by the committees that looked into the capital models.
That includes locating government departments at different places, exploiting the full potential the particular districts/regions may have in the form of government/waste lands, water, mineral resources and connectivity.
Or else, he runs the same risk as Naidu if everything develops around Vizag, otherwise a serene city, but at one corner of the state and far from Rayalaseema at the opposite end, some 600 km away. This is the primary challenge.
On the fiscal side, having gone for massive populism, Jagan will find it difficult, going forward, to meet the annual burden of over Rs 40,000 crore on welfare schemes for disadvantaged groups, each of which he has unveiled in accordance with his poll promises.
Even assuming he does have some negative traits, which his critics keep pointing out, it was no mean achievement for a man who did not have any political backing to capture people’s imagination and win their trust.
However, with depleting revenues and the Centre linking reforms to higher borrowings, the only option Jagan will be left with is to impose higher taxes, which could hit the middle and upper classes.
How well he balances populism while ensuring it does not hurt others is the second challenge. He also needs to find resources to take up projects that will ensure flow of money to the contractor classes (read in more sophisticated language as development), along with welfare. For now, he has a free run because the TDP leaders and cadre have lost morale and their future looks uncertain.
Naidu is 70-plus and his son, Lokesh, whose public speaking skills can put one to sleep or evoke laughter, hardly inspires confidence. But to underestimate the economic classes that back the TDP will be foolish.
They may wait for the father-son duo to give way, failing which they will unhesitatingly scout for a new face. Used as they are to wielding direct political power since the advent of the TDP, this section is still not looking at the BJP as an option since that will mean being beholden to the central leadership.
Also, in a state that is sharply divided along caste lines and has no history of prolonged Muslim rule, it will be an arduous task for the BJP’s Hindutva ideology to gain power.
For historical and other reasons, backward classes have been more comfortable with the TDP than the Congress or now, the YSR Congress. A picture of a meeting in Chittoor district the other day when a Reddy minister, considered close to the chief minister, was offered the ceremonial high seat, with the deputy chief minister belonging to BCs relegated to the one next to him, is only an example.
It’s wrong messaging, however, superficial the actual sharing of power may be. Jagan is not naïve and should be more than conscious of these challenges.
He is surely not a Tughlaq either, as some “senior/seasoned” journalists sought to describe his rule, from the cosy confines of their air-conditioned offices in Delhi.
They are as far removed from reality as Naidu was when he first thought Hitec City in Hyderabad and later, Amaravati, will add shine to his campaign.
G S Vasu
Editor, The New Indian Express (vasu@newindianexpress.com)