Chandrababu Naidu toys with a ‘southern’ Third Front

Chandrababu Naidu is said to be mulling prospects of forming a southern third front. Though Naidu was not available for his reactions, sources suggest that the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister is not averse to him being projected as a Prime Ministerial candidate. Sources say that Naidu will agree to be projected as PM because his sources have told him that Rahul Gandhi is not averse to his candidature.

“Rahul is dead against Narendra Modi and he will be agreeable to taking a back seat so long as it keeps Narendra Modi out of power,” top sources in the TDP believe.

Southern chief ministers – other than K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) of Telangana—are likely to agree to be part of the Naidu designed front. Moreover, they would not mind leaving the leadership to Naidu in view of his seniority.

Naidu is already in talks with Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy for an alternative platform in the general elections. A press release issued by Naidu’s office after talks between the two in Vijayawada at the end of August, called for ‘elaborate deliberations’ in the future.

The feeling that northern states dominate national politics and control New Delhi, to the exclusion of southern states, is a feeling that runs deep in south India. Naidu wants to tap into this feeling of deprivation and form a southern front. But after the formation of the front, Naidu will aim to ally with the Congress, sources suggested.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) came up in united Andhra Pradesh in the beginning of the 1980s as a counter weight and till recently the party’s politics was based on opposing the Congress. Thus it was aligned with the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance. TDP was an important constituent of the NDA government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the turn of the century.

Shocked by the Gujarat riots of 2002, Naidu had sought the dismissal of the Modi government in Gujarat, but he had failed to push the saffron bosses to sack Modi. This was in spite of the close relations that Naidu had with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom he influenced in numerous ways. Naidu was voluble even in 2012 when the name of Modi came up as BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate and suggested that his name be withdrawn.

After Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014 and Naidu became the chief minister the same year, things began to change. Although in public, the duo maintained good relations, Naidu realised that he had little clout with Modi. Probably Modi also realised that Naidu had antipathy to him and kept the latter at a distance. Naidu, already smarting under the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh that took away Hyderabad from him, decided to make a grand capital at a greenfield spot in Amaravati after he was elected to office in 2014.

He invited Modi to lay the foundation stone for building the new capital and the Prime Minister did the honours. But, slowly it became clear to Naidu that the union government was unwilling to part with a huge amount of resources required to build a magnificent capital that would rival Hyderabad. This was because the political credit for the new capital would be taken by Naidu. In mid- March this year, Naidu withdrew his two ministers in the Modi government (a cabinet minister and a minister of state) and walked out of the NDA with his 16 MPs.

The official reason was that a special category status (which would bring in more funds) was being denied to Andhra Pradesh by the union government. Analysts reckon that Naidu with his pro- business image is banking upon the support of big business – many of whom would like a counterweight to Modi. Although Naidu knows little Hindi and is not a great public speaker either, analysts feel that with his long experience he can be projected as a PM candidate.

He will be hamstrung by the fact that his state of Andhra Pradesh has only 23 seats in the Lok Sabha. This is against 42 that a united Andhra Pradesh had during the Vajpayee era. In fact, Naidu used his clout with Vajpayee to prevent the bifurcation of the state when three other new states (Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand) were created in 2000. But for Naidu, now 69, the 2019 elections could well be the last chance to make it to the top slot.

This article was edited at 3.53 pm to insert a paragraph