Nara Chandrababu Naidu, who steered his Telugu Desam Party (TDP) to a landslide victory in the Andhra Pradesh assembly elections, is back in the national limelight after a gap of nearly three decades.
Winning 16 Lok Sabha seats out of 25 from AP, the TDP is the biggest alliance partner of the BJP and is all set to play a key role in the formation of the NDA government at the Centre.
After failing to secure a majority on its own, the saffron party is dependent on its allies to provide a stable government at the Centre.
Clearly, Naidu (74), a three-time chief minister, is a man of the moment.
“The BJP leadership has offered him the post of the convenor of the NDA,” the TDP sources said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will fly down to Vijayawada on June 9 to attend the oath-taking ceremony of Chandrababu Naidu who will become Chief Minister for a fourth term.
The YSR Congress Party, headed by Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the TDP-led alliance that included actor-turned-politician Jana Sena Party and the BJP. Facing anti-incumbency and massive public anger over rural distress, unemployment, financial crisis and vendetta politics, the YSRCP is headed for a total rout with a majority of the ministers biting the dust at the hustings.
The ruling party’s tally is set to be reduced to 9 in the 175-member assembly while the TDP is set to win 137 seats on its own followed by its allies Jana Sena Party 21 and BJP 8.
This is the reversal of the 2019 assembly results when the YSRCP swept the polls, bagging 151 assembly seats.
Naidu in the spotlight
Naidu is now back in the national limelight, reminiscent of the coalition politics of the 1990s when he played the role of a king-maker in the formation of both the United Front and the NDA governments at the Centre.
In the wake of a fractured mandate in1996, Naidu, as the convenor of the United Front, helped in bringing together parties not aligned with either the Congress or the BJP and propping up the H D Deve Gowda government with outside support from the Congress.
In 1999, his party contested the Lok Sabha polls in alliance with the BJP and supported the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government which was short of the majority mark.
With 29 seats, TDP was BJP’s biggest ally then. In 2014 too, Naidu contested in alliance with the BJP and joined the Modi government, only to leave the alliance in 2018 ahead of Assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh in protest against denial of special category status to AP.
The 2024 Lok Sabha mandate has thrown up an opportunity for him to become a kingmaker again and herald the resurgence of his party which has suffered serious setbacks in the past few years.
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