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Journalism of Courage
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi filed his Lok Sabha nomination in Varanasi, part of his entourage were several politicians of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). One of them stood out – Pawan Kalyan of the fledgling Jana Sena Party (JSP), which was founded as recently as 2014.
Kalyan was the only leader from Andhra Pradesh, apart from veteran politician and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief N Chandrababu Naidu, to attend the much-hyped event. The results of the just concluded elections show it wasn’t for nothing that the budding politician had found his space at the NDA high table.
Kalyan’s JSP won both the Lok Sabha seats it contested. In the Assembly elections, held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, the JSP ended up as the second biggest party, with victories on all the 21 seats it contested and pushing the incumbent YSRCP to third position. The JSP fought the elections as part of an alliance with the TDP and BJP.
Kalyan’s impact was felt on two fronts in the elections – one, he worked as the glue that bound voters of the Kapu community, to which Kalyan belongs, to the TDP-BJP alliance; and second, he attracted scores of young voters to campaign rallies and possibly, polling booths.
In political circles, word is abuzz that Kalyan managed to bridge the gap between the TDP, traditionally known as a party of the politically powerful Kamma caste leaders, and the numerically strong Kapus, who form 18% of Andhra Pradesh’s population. By doing so, he may have changed the political landscape of AP for good since the political rivalry between the Kammas, who form just 6% of the state’s population, and Kapus dates back to the 1980s.
It started with a high-profile murder. Congress’s Kapu leader and MLA Vangaveeti Mohana Ranga Rao alias Ranga was killed in 1988 allegedly by the henchmen of Telugu Desam Party’s Kamma leader Devineni Rajasekhar alias Nehru. Ranga’s murder was believed to have been in retaliation to the killing of Nehru’s brother Devineni Murali the same year. Ranga was the prime accused in Murali’s murder.
Following Ranga’s death, Andhra Pradesh “went into violent convulsions”, writes Ramesh Kandula in his book on TDP founder N T Rama Rao (NTR). “Paramilitary forces were called in to contain the rioting mobs even as more than two dozen people were killed in police firings in a single day,” the book, Maverick Messiah, notes, adding that Vijayawada “burnt for days together”.
The Kapu votes that the TDP lost in the 1980s were never really won back from the Congress. After the Congress was decimated in Andhra Pradesh in 2014, following the formation of Telangana state, the Kapu votes went partially to the YSR Congress Party, led by YS Jagan Mohan Reddy. “This time around, Kapus have rallied behind Pawan Kalyan and this has helped the TDP-BJP alliance,” said TDP spokesperson Sushant Subudhi.
YSRCP, which has its own heavyweight Kapu leaders, has on several occasions dismissed Kalyan and called his campaigns “theatrics” which won’t translate into votes.
This election, Kalyan contested from Pithapuram Assembly constituency against YSRCP’s Vanga Geetha, who herself is a Kapu leader. He won this seat, unlike in 2019, when he lost from two constituencies – Gajuwaka of Visakhapatnam and Bhimavaram of West Godavari.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Kalyan’s JSP contested 16 out of 25 seats in the state. Of these, in five seats – Kakinada, Rajahmundry, Amalapuram, Narasapuram and Visakhapatnam –the party stood third, while the TDP was the runner-up, eventually losing to the YSRCP by vote percentages ranging from 0.33% (Visakhapatnam) to 9.72% (Rajahmundry). The BJP too had performed poorly, with its overall vote tally not rising beyond 0.96% in Andhra Pradesh.
But this year, in all these constituencies, the JSP managed to tilt the votes in favour of the BJP-TDP alliance.
For instance, in 2019, the Jana Sena got 20.67% of the votes in Amalapuram constituency while the TDP got 36.12% and YSRCP ended up as winner with 39.34% of the votes polled. This time, the JSP bridged the gap of 3.22% votes by which the TDP fell short of in 2019. G M Harish of the TDP,who was fielded in the constituency, eventually won by over three lakh votes.
Similarly, in Narasapuram, where the JSP got 21.27% votes in 2019, the BJP’s Bhupathi Raju Srinivasa Varma won by a margin of over two lakh votes. In all the other seats, the BJP and TDP candidates benefited from the JSP’s vote share that ranged between 2.7% and 21.27% in 2019.
The post-win mood at Kalyan’s party functions are “exuberant”, said a JSP leader, adding it was he who brought the TDP and BJP together this election. In 2019, the TDP had left the NDA fold and joined Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
“In our booth-level meetings post the election, workers are elated. Pawan Kalyan will be the conscience-keeper of the government in both the state and the centre,” JSP national spokesperson Ajay Kumar told the Indian Express.
