HYDERABAD, 27 July — Telugu Desam supremo and Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has begun a marathon exercise to analyse the causes for the party’s reverses in the just-concluded panchayat raj elections. He has also constituted a five-member panel to assist him in the task of evaluating the poll results and suggesting corrective measures.
Naidu is sore over his party’s not-so-impressive performance and, more particularly, the inroads made by the main opposition Congress in several districts and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in some.
Though the TDP bagged 11 out of the 19 zilla parishads for which the elections were completed, he is worried over the erosion of the party’s base in its strongholds, particularly in north coastal Andhra and Telangana regions, which had stood by the party in successive elections in the past.
A meting of TDP office-bearers was held on Wednesday for stock-taking. Besides senior ministers, party general secretaries and secretaries and other functionaries took up a preliminary review of the poll results.
The five-member panel, comprising MP Ummareddy Venkateswarlu and legislators R. Prakash Reddy, P. Ramulu, D. Uma Maheswara Rao and GSS Shivaji, has been constituted for detailed district-wise analysis. The “postmortem” is expected to be a long-drawn affair because Naidu wants to get at the root of the issue and pinpoint responsibility for the lapses that resulted in setback to the party in several districts.
The party’s internal assessment on the eve of the polls was that the TDP would get no less than 16 to 18 zilla parishads out of 22 and about 750 to 800 mandal parishads out of 1,094 in the state. However, the actual tally was 11 zilla parishads and 453 mandal parishads.
Naidu suspects that the pre-poll assessment reports of party observers and district functionaries, which predicted a landslide victory for the party, were not doctored. The reports failed to mention internal dissensions and the resentment among the electorate over certain issues.
Adding to the party chief’s worries is the fact that TDP fared poorly in those panchayats and zilla parishads which fall in the assembly constituencies of most of his cabinet colleagues and party legislators. The TDP got 512 out of 1,094 ZPTCs and 6,324 out of 14,591 MPTCs in the 22 districts.
Moreover, the party lost several zilla parishads by very thin margins and won some of them with similar margins. And in Naidu’s home district, the Congress bagged 33 ZPTCs out of 65. The TDP got the remaining 32 ZPTCs.
TDP is an important member of the National Democratic Alliance, the ruling combine at the center.
