Hyderabad: In the end he couldn’t believe it.
The verdict that Andhra Pradesh electorate handed Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy won 10 out of 175 Assembly seats and four out of 25 Lok Sabha seats for his YSRC.
His drubbing is mainly attributed to a shrunken voter base with several caste and social groups distancing themselves from the ruling party for total neglect of development and high-handedness of the ruling party leader besides reducing governance to pressing a button, a symbolic gesture for transfer of money to the beneficiaries.
In addition, a section of beneficiaries was also angry with the Jagan Mohan Reddy government for taking back more from them in the form of increased taxes and fees than what they were given through the welfare schemes. A majority of the male voters from among the beneficiaries had fumed at the ruling party leaders for monopolising the liquor trade and enhancing the prices, yet supplying low-quality liquor which they claimed had taken the lives of several downtrodden people.
The arrest of former chief minister and Telugu Desam supremo N. Chandrababu Naidu generated sympathy while his son and party general secretary Nara Lokesh’s walkathon instilled confidence among the party cadre. Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan’s relentless efforts to avoid split in anti-incumbency vote through the stitching tripartite alliance by roping in the BJP and ensuring smooth transfer of vote also played its part in Jagan Mohan Reddy’s rout.
“Our internal feedback indicated clearly that anyone earning more than `10,000 per month on their own is opposed to overdoing of DBT,” sources in the YSRC told this correspondent. “We allowed section after section to drift away, putting up a brave front that these sections were not our voters,” sources added.
The first warning bells rang in March 2023 when the party lost all the three graduates constituency MLC seats including two in the party’s stronghold of Rayalaseema. These seats covered nine districts and a voter count of about eight lakhs which is a huge sample to assess the people’s mood. Instead of introspection came an indifferent reaction from the foot-in-mouth party general secretary Sajjala Ramakrishna Reddy that graduates were not his party’s voters.
According to poll observers, the repeated insulting of Pawan Kalyan by none other than Jagan Mohan Reddy himself referring to the former’s three marriages consolidated the Kapu vote for the Jana Sena which had failed to get even 30 per cent of the vote in 2019. Arrest and beating up of Raghurama Krishna Raju distanced the Kshatriyas, an influential community in the two Godavari districts, from the YSRC.
“Even the three capitals political ploy angered the people,” said state BJP spokesperson Sadineni Yamini Sharma. According to her, rampant conversions into Christianity and brazen efforts to grab the land of commoners by YSRC leaders led to severe anti-incumbency.
The state government employees were another section which supported Jagan Mohan Reddy outrightly five years ago but went all out against him this time. “We openly supported Jagan who promised to do away with the previous TD government’s initiatives but worsened our position. Our retirement benefits were held back due to lack of funds and they were deferred for years. Cases were booked and leaders were jailed for questioning their rights,” said one employees’ leader who was arrested by the Jagan Mohan Reddy government.
