Mahakutami is a marriage of convenience

TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu is a master at forging opportunistic alliances. When the BJP was doing well, he latched on to them and retuned to power. He later dumped them and is now honeymooning with Telangana Rashtra Samithi. The ‘Mahakutami’ (Grand Alliance), which felt elated over the support promised by MRPS leader Manda Krishna Madiga, is now caught in a web with the latter sticking to his demand of 30 Assembly and four Lok Sabha seats.

Leaders from Khammam unit of TDP recently demanded that the party should at no cost agree to give the Khammam Lok Sabha seat to the Left. CPI had originally claimed the seat but is understood to have agreed to leave Khammam to TDP and in return got Nalgonda LS and two other seats in the district. Apart from this, the TD and the TRS are fighting over who should contest from seats like Mancherial, Sircilla, Jedcharla and Parkal, where both the parties are equally strong. Lok Sabha seats like Adilabad and Malkajgiri also being equally claimed by

the TD and the TRS.

Moreover, TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao’s unilateral announcement of his party candidates from some seats like Kukatpally, Serlingampally and Makhtal has made TD leaders angry. TD’s aspirants in these segments are making hue and cry over the decision of the TRS chief and are stepping up pressure on Naidu not to leave these seats to the TRS. Even the Left parties are also unable to arrive on a mutual agreement over seats-sharing issue between them. Both the CPI and the CPM are asking for Assembly seats like Araku, Wyra and Huzurabad simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the TD, the TRS and the CPM have not agreed on who should contest from Warangal East, Uppal and Musheerabad seats. There are some seats like Vinukonda, which are equally claimed by the TD and the CPI.

Sharing of constituencies is only the first of the vexatious issues for the Grand Alliance. An emerging challenge is that electoral arthimetic and political chemistry does not always jell. Both the TDP and TRS rank and file recall the bitter acrimony between Naidu and Chandrasekhara Rao in the run up to the 2004 elections when booklets were published calling each other names.

The buzz among Rao’s detractors is that naidu acquiesced to the idea of having a deputy CM if the four-party coalition has the requisite majority in the new legislative assembly. A third challenge is to wean and win significant support in Telangana.

Naidu is a new convert to the separate Telangana ideology. Previously he harped on ‘Samkhya Andhra Pradesh.”On his part, Chandraskehara Rao failed to do enough to achieve separate statehood to Telangana though he had got votes, MPs, MLAs. He could not hold his flock together with many flying and nesting in the Congress camp. These factors make it doubly difficult for Naidu and KCR to get the majority of seats in Telangana. To dislodge the Congress Party, the Grand Alliance is trying to cover up its inadequacies by banking on the glamour of Tollywood.
Mahakutami is a marriage of conveience.