TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu is making hue and cry of the by-election irregularities on the day of polling.
If one goes by the media coverage and TDP activists’ hullabaloo in Tirupati, particularly covering people on the road and calling them fake voters or imported persons for impersonation, it appears as if Chandrababu Naidu had prepared the ground to justify his party’s defeat.
The media and TDP activists have focused only on the people on streets or near the polling stations and projected them as outsiders came for impersonation.
Keeping aside his dramas, Naidu is known for his own and peculiar style of poll management, particularly when he is in power.
People who have seen the Nandyala Assembly seat by-election in 2017, Chandrababu Naidu should be the last person to talk about poll violations and irregularities.
Starting from the Vyyuru Assembly by-election in 1996 to the Nandyala Assembly by-election in 2017, Naidu has his own style of managing the elections, whenever he is in power.
He deploys Ministers, MP, MLAs, MLCs and senior leaders of the party to camp in villages. He posts at least two leaders in every village to handle the campaign.
This poll management had gone to the extreme level in Nandyala in 2017, when his party created fake voters, particularly youth, drawn from the Narayana colleges.
He deployed several teams of the police in plain cloths to influence the voters, in several cases, threaten them to vote for his party.
It is time, someone must remind Chandrababu Naidu of his own style of election management and ask him to compare the Tirupati election before complaining to the Election Commission.
What he speaks is not about the election irregularities, but a reason to justify his party’s humiliating defeat in the store.