VIJAYAWADA: The ruling YSRC, which swept the urban local body elections, secured more than 24.97 lakh votes while the Opposition TDP got 14.58 lakh votes. In terms of share of votes, the YSRC secured 52.63 per cent of votes and the TDP only 30.73 per cent votes.According to the data available, more than 48.42 lakh votes were polled, of which 96,000-odd were invalid, taking the total valid votes to 47,46,195.
The ruling YSRC won 2,265 seats (including unanimous) while the TDP got 349 seats in the ULBs.
The TDP, which claimed during the panchayat elections that it got 40 per cent of votes and that it would better its performance in the ULB elections, however, suffered a severe drubbing by getting just 30.73 per cent votes. The Jana Sena Party stood at the third place with 4.67 per cent vote share while the BJP, which itself considered as the senior partner in the alliance with JSP, got just 2.47 per cent votes. Barring these four parties, no other party — the CPI, CPM, Congress and other regional registered parties — could get more than one per cent share of votes. Surprisingly, NOTA has a higher percentage of vote share than these parties.
Before the election to urban local bodies, the TDP leaders were of the view that urban voters were not satisfied with the YSRC government and the anti-incumbency will help it. However, it proved wrong with the YSRC bagging all the 11 Municipal Corporations and 73 municipalities/nagar panchayats out of the total 75.
When contacted, TDP spokesperson K Pattabhi said they would not respond on the figures until the State Election Commission (SEC) releases the data officially. “Except the official declaration of the votes by the SEC, we will consider the figures coming out as fake,” he said.Another TDP leader, on the condition of anonymity, said that the results of ULBs was a wake up call to the party leadership as the drop in vote share is ringing alarm bells. “Though we cannot compare the voting percentage of municipal bodies to the general elections, it is time for introspection and we hope party chief N Chandrababu Naidu will come up with new strategies to instill confidence among the cadre,” he said.
He observed that the aggressive attack on the government and blaming the people during the electioneering in Vijayawada and Guntur proved counter-productive. “Though the YSRC government has implemented various welfare schemes, it failed in certain areas like the sand policy, which resulted in scarcity of the construction material, leaving many construction workers jobless. But we have failed to cash in on such issues by going in the routine way of criticising the government,” he opined.
Meanwhile, the YSRC leaders say that though they did not draw good dividends in the urban constituencies in the 2019 elections and won some of them with narrow margins, they managed to win all the ULBs. While the popularity graph of Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy has increased in the past 21 months, the graph of TDP and Naidu declined sharply, they claimed. AP State Agriculture Mission Vice-Chairman and YSRC leader MVS Nagi Reddy said the revolutionary changes brought by Jagan in administration and the timely implementation of the welfare schemes even during the Covid crisis resulted in the party increasing its vote share.