Hyderabad: The badly bruised Telugu Desam leaving the electoral battlefield midway, boycotting the zilla parishad and mandal parshad elections slated for April 8 may do more harm than good to the party.
Despite the boycott, TD candidates will remain in the fray as they have already filed nominations and the deadline for withdrawal was over by the time the polls were put off last March. Now, the ballot papers with their names and party symbol will be used on April 8.
The immediate adverse impact of the boycott decision could be the party’s contestants, flag-bearers of the party at ground level and regularly bear the brunt of the opponents ire, feeling let down.
There will be migration of the party cadre and vote to others, predominantly the Jana Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party combine, which is waiting in the wings to become the alternative political force in the state. Besides, the cadre working hard for the party for the Tirupati Lok Sabha bypoll will get demoralised further.
TD president N. Chandrababu Naidu tried his best to assert that he is not running away fearing the YSR Congress but only wanted to educate people on what he described as Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s “rule of oppression”.
The decision, according to party insiders, was a fall-out of the second-rung leaders’ reluctance to fund or campaign for the party candidates in the wake of the drubbing in the recently-held gram panchayat and municipal polls.
Sources said though Naidu was initially averse to the idea, he was left with no option but to announce withdrawal from the contest. Some former ministers repeatedly highlighting the arrests and inquiring about the facilities in jails with the arrested leaders in the meeting held by Naidu was a reflection of their fear, a senior leader pointed out.
“The party was let down by the second-rung leaders who enjoyed the fruits of power as ministers and MLAs and are now afraid of facing the ruling party,” said a party sympathiser who actively voices TD views on social media. “We should not forget that the party, even in the worst-ever performance, polled 32 per cent in municipalities and 40-45 per cent in some of the corporations,” he added.
The TD president citing the YSR Congress’ coercion and absence of rule of law as reasons for the boycott also did not go down well in political circles. “The TD officially announced that they won 40 per cent gram panchayats held on non-party basis and burst crackers at party headquarters. This contradicts the theory of coercion,” said YSR Congress spokesman and MLA Ambati Rambabu.
