There is no mistaking the fact that the results of the recent 18 Assembly and one Lok Sabha by-elections in Andhra Pradesh are a wake-up call to the Congress in its bastion which it can ill afford to ignore. With 15 of the 18 Assembly seats and the lone Lok Sabha seat having gone to Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress, the writing is on the wall for the Congress that had elected the highest number of 33 Lok Sabha MPs from the state in 2009.
There is a combination of factors that has contributed to the serious decline of the Congress, the salient among them being the ongoing revolt and arrest of Jagan Mohan Reddy on the eve of the elections, which unleashed a sympathy wave for him, the ineptitude of Chief Minister Kiran Reddy who has no real mass base, and the sustained mishandling of the Telangana issue by central leaders leading to the resurgence of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in the Telangana region.
With elections to the Lok Sabha and the Andhra Assembly slated for early 2014, it is perhaps too late for a change of guard to make any dramatic difference in the state. Consequently, the Congress has to make its 2014 calculations taking into account the diminished seat share in Andhra and to look to other states to see how it can make up or surpass its 2009 tally in the Lok Sabha.
The party cannot but be worried that there is no charismatic leader to replace an ineffective Kiran Reddy and to match the demagogic and organisational skills of Jagan Mohan Reddy who is going from strength to strength.
In the 2009 Assembly elections when Jagan Mohan’s father Y S Rajashekara Reddy was at the helm in the state, the Congress had won 16 of the 18 Assembly seats in question. The other two were won by actor Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam Party, which later merged with the Congress. This time around, the post-merger Congress lost a whopping 62 per cent of their combined vote in 2009, claiming a mere two seats. Rarely has such a massive change of public mood been reflected in a span of five years.
The Nellore Lok Sabha seat showed the same trend. Won by the Congress in 2009 by about 55,000 votes, it went to the YSR Congress this time with a margin of 2.91 lakh votes with the trounced candidate being former Union minister T Subbarami Reddy.
In the bargain, the Telugu Desam Party, which is the principal opposition party in the Assembly, was virtually wiped out both in the Assembly and Lok Sabha bypolls. This was the price its leader and former chief minister Chandrababu Naidu had to pay for opposing Jagan Mohan Reddy.
On Telangana too, the Congress is in a seemingly no-win situation. So long has it allowed the issue to drift that any attempt to disturb the status quo now could unleash a violent agitation which the party in its present state would be unable to deal with.
Significantly, in the lone by-election from the Telangana region, the TRS only managed to scrape through, followed closely by the YSR Congress nominee. The Telugu Desam Party was nowhere in the picture.
The mood in the YSR Congress camp is upbeat and there many Congress legislators waiting to cross over to it. Left with a strength of 153 in a House of 294 members, the Congress is well and truly on the edge. The saving grace for it is the seven-member All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) group which is consistent in its support for the party. The MIM also has a Lok Sabha member from Hyderabad who supports the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre.
Significantly, so far the YSR Congress has kept a distance from the BJP which with its 3.7 per cent vote share in the 2009 Assembly poll spread thinly across the state is still too weak to be in contention as a weighty ally. On the Telangana issue the BJP is beginning to find some acceptance, having made known its support for a separate state of Telangana. That of the seven by-elections that took place in Telangana in March last, four were won by the TRS but the BJP managed to win one in Mahbubnagar is an index that it still has some potential there.
A post-poll alliance with the YSR Congress extending support to the NDA at the Centre cannot, however, be ruled out if the BJP plays its cards well.
A significant aspect of the YSR Congress triumph in the recent by-elections was the manner in which the electorate ignored the corruption charges against Jagan Mohan Reddy. When he filed his mandatory declaration before the Election Commission before he was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2011, Jagan had declared assets worth `391 crore against `61 crore in 2009. His wife’s assets were shown as `55 crore against `16.09 crore in 2009. The current assets of both are deemed to be an understatement since, among others, his investments into Sakshi newspaper and Indira Television are not disclosed.
There are allegations that Jagan multiplied his assets manifold through crucial decisions and deals worked out during his father Rajashekara Reddy’s chief-ministership particularly in the allotment of thousands of acres of land to special economic zones and other private developers.
Clearly, many of the Kiran Reddy government’s ministers were with Y S R Reddy in his Cabinet then and the people find it difficult to believe that they were not involved in those shady deals. The common refrain among people is that if there was such large-scale corruption and bungling during the YSR regime why was the Congress looking the other way then?
The dramatic birth of the Telugu Desam Party in the 1970s was the result of N T Rama Rao exploiting the sentiment of the people against the ‘insult’ meted out to Chief Minister T Anjaiah by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by publicly rebuking him. Likewise, the Jagan Mohan camp has been able to build on the ‘insults’ meted out to YSR family by the ruling Congress. Following Jagan Mohan’s arrest by the CBI on May 27, his mother Vijayamma and sister Sharmila, who toured all the 18 Assembly constituencies and the Nellore Lok Sabha segment, managed to keep the sympathy factor alive and kicking.
It is anybody’s guess if young Jagan Mohan will be able to sustain his good showing in a simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly election. That would be a herculean challenge for a fledgling party but it does not seem beyond him.
Kamlendra Kanwar is a veteran journalist and author.
E-mail: k.kamlendra@gmail.com
