A series of resignations by senior leaders from Telugu Desam Party in the last two days is learnt to have dealt a big psychological blow to party president and former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu at a time when his party is desperately trying to regain some strength in the local body elections.
In the last two days, several seniors like MLC Dokka Manikya Varaprasada Rao from Guntur, ex-MLC Satish Reddy from Pulivendula and former minister P Ramasubba Reddy from Jammalamadugu (both from Kadapa) and Kadiri Babu Rao from Kanigiri resigned from the party, expressing dissatisfaction over the style of functioning of Naidu.
And on Wednesday, Naidu received yet another jolt with the resignation of former MLA Panchakarla Ramesh Babu, stating that he was not happy with the attitude of the high command. He found fault with Naidu and also his son Nara Lokesh for ruining the party.
Pachakarla said he had been under pressure to oppose Visakhapatnam as the executive capital and support Amaravati.
“This was against my conscience. I did not like the way the party brought pressure on me,” he said.
Though there are no immediate provocations for the resignations of so many leaders at a time from the TDP, it is pretty evident that they are all part of YSR Congress party’s mind game against Naidu.
“The main objective of engineering resignations by these leaders from the TDP and defections into the YSRC is to weaken Naidu psychologically so that he won’t be able to take an aggressive posture. After all, Naidu also engineered defections in a big way during his tenure and he has no moral grounds to criticise the YSRC,” an analyst observed.