The late Wednesday night meeting between TDP’s N Chandrababu Naidu and BJP’s Amit Shah at the latter’s residence in Delhi has again raised the prospects of the former partner returning to the NDA fold. The meeting was also attended by BJP president JP Nadda.
The coming together of the two parties is expected to bolster their prospects in the upcoming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh. It is believed TDP’s ally Jana Sena Party led by Pawan Kalyan will be a part. Kalyan was scheduled to join the meeting between the BJP and the TDP in Delhi for finalising the seat-sharing formula. Naidu’s return to the NDAfold will be his third since it was formed in 1998. The party supported the BJP in the confidence vote in 1998 which led to the formation of the AB Vajpayee government. Later, it parted ways with the BJP.
The TDP, formed by former Andhra chief minister NT Rama Rao in 1982, has been led by his son-in-law N Chandrababu Naidu since 1995. The TDP returned to the NDA in 2014 when the BJP fought its first LS election under Modi. Both the parties contested the LS and Andhra assembly elections together. In the LS election then, of the 42 seats, the TDP won 16 and the BJP all the three it contested. TRS led by K Chandrashekar Rao won 11, YSRCP 9, Congress 2 and AIMIM 1 seat in the undivided state. However, the
TDP walked out of the NDA in 2018
TDP walked out of the NDA in 2018 and the split cost TDP and BJP dear in the following polls. In the 2019 Assembly poll in Andhra, YSR Congress Party led by Jagan Mohan Reddy secured 151 of the 175 seats and polled 49.95 per cent votes. The TDP-JSP alliance got 23 seats and 39.17 per cent votes. The 2019 LS election in Andhra too felt the split’s impact. The YSRCP swept the poll by winning 22 of the 25 LS seats (17 went into newly formed Telangana).
The remaining three seats went to TDP while national parties like the Congress and the BJP failed to open their accounts. In terms of vote percentage, YSRCP got 49.15 per cent, TDP bagged 39.59 per cent, Jana Sena 5.79 per cent, Congress 1.29 per cent and the BJP ended up with 0.96 per cent of the votes polled.
As such in the forthcoming LS as well as Assembly polls, neither BJP nor TDP-Jana Sena alliance has much to lose. Rather bringing in the Modi factor to work even a little bit during the elections to LS and assembly, they might cause a dent in YSRCP vote share and win some seats. The Jana Sena and the TDP have already discussed seats as they want to defeat YSR Congress in assembly poll. BJP would settle for a few MLA seats as that does not matter to it much. Its state unit president Daggubati Purandeswari has been advocating an alliance with TDP and Jana Sena for a long time.
