Nara Chandrababu Naidu is a religious soul but the aspirational human being that he is, like all of us, he will not be able to follow what Lord Krishna said in the Bhagvad Gita about man only doing his duty and not worrying about the results. For Naidu is certain to fret over whether his 208 days long walkathon over 2800 km has been worth the effort. The Telugu Desam chief ends his padyatra in Visakhapatnam today but he will have to wait almost 12 months to get his report card, post the elections to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly and Lok Sabha in April 2014.
On the face of it, Naidu has much to gloat about. His padyatra has left the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy’s 1470 km long effort over 64 days in 2003 several steps behind and is the longest by a politician in Andhra Pradesh. But it is not a place in the Limca Book of Records that Naidu is eyeing. He would hope all the people who have seen and heard him, all the people he has hugged, patted and shook hands with in the last six months vote for him. Otherwise, Naidu’s long journey since 2 October, when he started walking from Hindupur in the Rayalaseema region, would go down the drain.
For a leader who was celebrated during his nine years as chief minister for the virtual connect he made through video conferences and use of internet, Naidu’s padyatra was an attempt to reconnect with the real world. He did not hesitate to apologise for the mistakes he made as CM and promised to turn a new leaf.
Aware that his honeymoon period with the people of Andhra Pradesh – the time he was feted as one of the best chief ministers in India – is a fading memory, Naidu has promised the moon from Hindupur to Vizag. He offered sops to virtually every section of society – from Dalits to priests, weavers to minorities and students. Never mind that he used to frown upon the same populist agenda during his days in power. At that time, his friends in the World Bank used to laud him for introducing reforms, like those he brought about in the power sector. It took two successive electoral defeats for Naidu to realise that the World Bank is not a vote bank in Andhra Pradesh.
Naidu’s critics – and there is no dearth of them in his state – point out that his desperation to return to power is showing. Chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy who refers to Naidu as his “walking friend” mocks him saying even the entire central budget will not be enough to fulfill all the promises the TDP chief has made.
There were other speedbreakers during the six months that Naidu spent on the road. Ten MLAs bid adieu to the TDP, even as Naidu thought he was boosting the morale of the party cadre through his mass contact programme. He did manage to lift the party’s sagging spirits in the Telangana region, where the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) has delivered it a knockout punch. Given his wishy-washy stance on Telangana, Naidu is still looked at with suspicion in the region and despite the TDP’s large cadre, the party will find it difficult to do well in Telangana.
Naidu’s problems are no less in the Seemandhra regions. Here he faces a formidable opposition in the YSR Congress, which is why Naidu has spent much lung power criticising the alleged corruption of YSR and Jaganmohan Reddy. Naidu’s hope is that Andhra Pradesh’s voters would emulate what their counterparts in Tamil Nadu did in 2011 – vote against a ‘corrupt’ party. But a combination of factors – the support base that still exists for YSR, the feeling in the countryside that Jagan is being targeted by the CBI at the behest of the Congress and Naidu’s own crisis of credibility – has seen the TDP trailing the YSRC in different independent surveys done in the non-Telangana regions.
If it was a straight contest between the Congress and the TDP, like it was between 1983 and 2004, Naidu’s journey to the Secretariat would have been a cakewalk. The launch of Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam just before the 2009 polls ate into Naidu’s votes and now both TDP and YSRC are vying for the same anti-Congress vote. Naidu has been crying hoarse about YSRC being a branch office of the Congress and why there is good reason to embrace the TDP bicycle for a better life in Andhra Pradesh.
The 2014 elections will be a make or break affair for Naidu. A loss would bring his leadership into question and will reduce him to a has-been politician. One positive he has achieved during his padyatra is identifying candidates for more than half the assembly constituencies. That will give the party a headstart in the campaign. He also needs to encourage new blood and new faces in the party for many of those who occupy leadership roles have been around for more than three decades and give the party a jaded look.
Naidu hopes that people disillusioned with the abysmal quality of governance by the Congress will vote for someone who has a proven track record in administration. And if Naidu is indeed the new wine in an old bottle, there may be good reason to give him another chance. But for that, he needs to move away from the negative campaigning that he indulges in 24×7 and exude more positive energy, with a clear roadmap for Andhra Pradesh’s future.
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