After hectic deliberations and intense lobbying at the highest level, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) joined the alliance of the Telugu Desam and Jana Sena Party in Andhra Pradesh despite resistance from many of its local leaders.
The BJP did a hard bargain for the assembly and Lok Sabha seats in the state and finally agreed to contest six Lok Sabha seats and 10 assembly seats.
The Jana Sena Party led by power star Pawan Kalyan had to make a lot of sacrifice to bring the BJP into the alliance, so as to prevent the split of anti-incumbency votes.
So far so good. But the alliance doesn’t seem to be working out well at the ground level as the three parties have not come together to take up a joint campaign in the elections.
Except on March 17, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a joint rally along with TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu and Pawan Kalyan, there have been no instances of the leaders of the three parties addressing any other rallies together.
At least, Naidu and Pawan Kalyan have addressed a few common rallies together, meeting each other regularly and discussing the strategies. Even at the field level, there is some kind of understanding between the TDP and Jana Sena cadres.
But the BJP is nowhere in the picture. The BJP leaders are not coming to the joint rallies of the TDP and Jana Sena.
Only on April 10, BJP state president D Purandeswari joined them in Nidadavolu, apparently because the assembly segment forms part of Rajamahendravaram Lok Sabha constituency from where she is seeking election to the Lok Sabha.
Except in the constituencies where ex-TDP leaders who had defected to the BJP, like C M Ramesh in Anakapalli, Sujana Chowdary in Vijayawada and Adinarayana Reddy in Jammalamadugu, nowhere else one can notice the flags of the BJP, Jana Sena and TDP flying together.
Even at the Jana Sena Party’s rallies, too, the BJP leaders are not joining. There has been stoic silence from leaders like Somu Veerraju, G V L Narasimha Rao, P V N Madhav and S Vishnuvardhan Reddy, who are neither seen nor heard.
The BJP leaders, surprisingly, are not making any strong attack on the YSRCP leaders in general and chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy in particular. At the same time, Jagan, too, has not been touching the BJP leaders, but criticising only the TDP and Jana Sena.
According to a political analyst, the BJP is not showing interest in the TDP-Jana Sena Party alliance, but has joined them only for political convenience.
Maybe, the TDP itself is avoiding inviting the BJP leaders to the campaign fearing loss of minority votes, he added.