By Oracle
The numbers have almost been frozen. Now the puppeteer of the “Grand Alliance” ensured that the allocation was done at his will and pleasure.
The senior most partners of the anarchic alliance, the helmsmen in the Congress, are kowtowing to the Telugu Desam boss N Chandrababu Naidu. Funnily, the numerous aspirants of the chief ministerial job are not being averse to be subservient to him. Some of them called on him on the sly and some did it openly.
In the scheme of things in the Grand Alliance, only Naidu’s party gets to cherrypick the seats it wants to contest, while all others will fight it out for what they should get.
Kodandaram’s party with no political experience whatsoever is clueless as to how to go about. The Communist Party of India, with its national general secretary Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy being from Telangana, was trying to stretch things the way it wants. But CPI yielded finally to the pressure from their former benefactor and the current puppeteer Chandrababu Naidu.
Now, the seat-sharing has moved just a notch above from where it was languishing until now. Even for that, a formal announcement has to come. The Congress will now contest 91 seats, the TDP will enter the fray from 15 seats, the Telangana Jana Samithi from 8 and the CPI from five seats.
Who will contest from where?
Now, this becomes querulous between the parties. Naidu chose to field eight of his party candidates from the Assembly seats in Hyderabad. Naidu thinks that his party has the strength in these constituencies.
A dissection of his confidence about these constituencies would expose the shallowness of the “self-proclaimed senior most politician” of the country. The elections held to the Assembly in 2004 yielded two seats each for the TDP in Ranga Reddy and Hyderabad districts. The 2009 story, in spite of allying with the TRS, proved no different. While the TDP won five out of 24 (all in erstwhile Ranga Reddy district), the rest were bagged by others.
However, Chandrababu Naidu doesn’t stop his rhetoric of developing Hyderabad and making tall and shallow proclamations, which are far from the truth.
TDP’s vote bank drifts to TRS en masse
The TDP is harping on its own core vote bank which had long ago gone adrift to TRS. The joint campaign and focused attempt by Naidu and his son Lokesh couldn’t cut much ice in the city. The people proved that they rejected him outright by uprooting the TDP lock, stock and barrel in the city in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections. The TDP won just one out 150 seats and shame as it is, even that corporator moved to TRS.
Though some MLAs won the 2014 elections on TDP ticket with the support of the BJP, all of them joined the TRS, barring R Krishnaiah of LB Nagar who has never acted like a TDP MLA.
Now, Naidu’s other gimmicks are being impaled by the TRS. It’s only a conjecture of time before the strings of the puppets strain and gets snapped.