{"id":59724,"date":"2009-05-30T18:31:09","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T18:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/test.tehelka.com\/?p=59724"},"modified":"2009-05-30T18:31:09","modified_gmt":"2009-05-30T18:31:09","slug":"eating-the-cake-and-the-cherry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/eating-the-cake-and-the-cherry\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating The Cake And The Cherry"},"content":{"rendered":"

YSR<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>has shot back to power, thanks to strategic moves and a massive PR exercise, says<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>Ajit Sahi<\/strong>
\n

\"Celebrations<\/a>
Celebrations galore<\/strong> Supporters offer cake to YSR after the party’s resounding victory in AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nSHORTLY AFTER<\/strong> the second and final round of balloting for the Lok Sabha elections in his state ended on April 23, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy travelled to New Delhi and met Congress president Sonia Gandhi. \u201c32,\u201d he told her, according to a senior party leader. That was the number of Lok Sabha seats he promised the party would win in his state. And then, he proceeded to the cool environs of Shimla for a short but much needed break from politics.<\/span>
\nAs it turned out last week, Reddy\u2019s Congress won 33 of the state\u2019s 42 constituencies \u2014 four more than in 2004 \u2014 giving Andhra Pradesh the distinction of sending the largest number of Congress MPs from any state to the 15th Lok Sabha. YSR, as he is widely known, also won 158 of the Assembly\u2019s 294 seats, becoming the first Congress CM in three decades to get a successive second term. Incidentally, he is also the state\u2019s only CM to ever complete a full five-year term.<\/span>
\nWhat makes the win unique is that YSR, who will be 60 years old in July, successfully sidestepped a massive campaign alleging corruption, launched by his key rival, former Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu\u2019s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and its four-party alliance. The TDP led \u2018Grand Alliance\u2019 had even presented President Pratibha Patil with documents to back claims that the chief minister and his son, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy \u2014 who, too, has been elected an MP \u2014 were involved in illegal land and corporate deals, including the Satyam scandal.<\/span><\/p>\n

YSR\u2019s son launched a publicity campaign through his newspaper and TV news channel<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the voters didn\u2019t buy that. \u201cEveryone accepts that corruption is natural,\u201d says political commentator K Sree Lakshmamma in the central town of Guntur. \u201cPeople voted for YSR\u2019s development work of the last five years, ignoring the charges of corruption.\u201d<\/span>
\n\u201cYSR was focussed on bringing in development right from the start,\u201d adds Amar Devulapalli, chairman of the Press Academy of Andhra Pradesh in Hyderabad. \u201cTwo crore people have benefited from his schemes; the voters didn\u2019t want to disturb his government.\u201d<\/span>
\nMuch of YSR\u2019s famous victory is attributed to his all-round personality, that of a crafty politician, who deeply values and rewards loyalty, and a no-nonsense administrator. YSR began on a high after becoming CM in 2004, crushing Naxal insurgents that had been entrenched in Andhra Pradesh for decades and had killed thousands of police and paramilitary, after talks with them broke down.<\/span>
\n[box]
\nPARTY POSITION<\/span><\/strong><\/span>
\nANDHRA PRADESH<\/span>
\n<\/strong>LOK SABHA SEATS<\/span><\/strong>
\nCONGRESS: 33\u00a0<\/span>
\nBJP: 0\u00a0<\/span>
\nTRS: 2\u00a0<\/span>
\nTDP: 6<\/span><\/span><\/span>
\nASSEMBLY SEATS<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>
\nCONGRESS: 158
\nTDP: 92
\nTRS:10
\nPRP: 18<\/span>
\n[\/box]
\nA medical doctor who once treated the poor for free, YSR\u2019s welfare sops included selling rice at Rs 2 per kg, ensuring free medical treatment to BPL (below poverty line) families at \u2018corporate\u2019 hospitals, supplying free electricity to farmers, a pension scheme for widows, waiver of farm loans, and a highly subsidised housing scheme named after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. YSR also announced a four percent reservation for backward Muslims.<\/span>
\nWHEN FILM<\/strong> star Chiranjeevi launched the Praja Rajya party (PRP) last August, triggering speculation that he could challenge YSR, the chief minister immediately began a comprehensive PR campaign publicising his various welfare steps, the most notable being the massive irrigation projects worth over Rs 1 lakh crore to provide water to some ten million acres of agricultural land.<\/span>
\nIn fact, YSR chose the route of launching welfare schemes \u2014 which have totalled 26 \u2014 to not only trip up the opposition but also wean away legislators from a rival within the party: state Congress president, D Srinivas, who has lost the Assembly election. Predictably, more than 180 of the Congress candidates that fought the Assembly elections are YSR loyalists. This has ensured that his base within the party remains strong, even after some 14 ministers lost the election, as did the Assembly speaker.<\/span>
\nAfter a former ally, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), which wants a separate state in the Telangana region of northwest Andhra Pradesh, quit the Congress-led alliance in 2006, YSR launched several welfare schemes in Telangana. \u201cWe wanted voters to move away from the TRS,\u201d says a Congress leader close to the chief minister. YSR\u2019s focus on Telangana paid off as the TRS won only 10 of the 46 Assembly seats it contested there. The Congress won 50 seats.<\/span>
\nIn the coastal regions, YSR called off a 1,000-km industrial corridor when protests by villagers, who claimed that they were being forced to part with their land, threatened to balloon into a controversy. This was a smart political move, because many of these villagers belonged to the numerically significant Hindu Kapu caste. Chiranjeevi, who is a Kapu, failed to get the caste to vote\u00a0en masse<\/em>\u00a0for the PRP. Instead, they voted for YSR.<\/span>
\nYSR\u2019s son Jagan, who also campaigned dedicatedly across the state, launched a huge publicity campaign through his newspaper and TV news channel, both named Sakshi. As the state\u2019s two biggest newspapers \u2014\u00a0Andhra Jyothi<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Eenadu<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 ran news exposing government corruption,\u00a0Sakshi<\/em>\u00a0took on the opposition and highlighted the government schemes.<\/span>
\nAll throughout, YSR ensured that he kept party bigwigs on his side. He shrewdly obliged three ministers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh\u2019s previous government, S Jaipal Reddy, D Purandareswari and Panabaka Lakshmi, by giving them new constituencies from where each of them won.<\/span>
\nA smart strategist, YSR launched on a month-long election tour covering more than 20 districts in the state, working 18-hour days, until long after his key rivals \u2014 Chiranjeevi as well as Telugu film actors Junior NTR and Balakrishna of the TDP \u2014 were beginning to wind down. Indeed, YSR\u2019s achievement is being hailed all the more because he humbled two giants \u2014 former CM Naidu whose TDP ruled the state for three terms during 1983-2004, and Chiranjeevi, whose PRP was widely expected to mount a massive challenge.<\/span>
\nNaidu\u2019s loss is more overwhelming because he stitched up a pre-election alliance with three former Congress allies: the TRS, the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India.<\/span>
\nThat the PRP would undercut the Congress and not the TDP was the biggest miscalculation most people made, including Naidu,\u201d says commentator BV Chalapathi Rao, a politics professor in Sri Venkateswara University in the temple town of Tirupathi. Actually, the TDP and the PRP ended up undercutting each other, thereby benefitting the Congress tremendously.<\/span>
\nA close look at the numbers reveals that in as many as 25 Lok Sabha seats that the Congress won, the combined votes of the TDP-led four-party alliance and the PRP exceeded the Congress votes. In at least 17 of those seats, the opposition jointly polled more than a lakh votes over the winning Congress candidate. Indeed, although the final Lok Sabha tally read Congress 33 and the TDP-led alliance 8, the vote difference between the two sides was only a fraction over one percent. But a winner-takes-all system that doesn\u2019t care how the vote is split ensured that the Congress \u2018swept\u2019 the state and YSR emerged a hero.<\/span>
\najit@tehelka.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

YSR has shot back to power, thanks to strategic moves and a massive PR exercise, says Ajit Sahi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":59741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,1281,1886,236,4710,8811,8812,8121,8813,855,6852,8814,8815,8816],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59724"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}