Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu used to claim very often – he does it even now – that he had rejected the Prime Minister post offer twice in the past.
He makes the claim only to impress upon the people of Andhra that he had sacrificed the PM post for the sake of his home state and nothing is more important for him than making Andhra Pradesh the No. 1 state in the country.
Well, the fact of the matter is that not many people in the country want to see Naidu in the Prime Minister post.
In fact, he is the least preferred candidate among the opposition for the Prime Minister post. This was indicated during the latest survey conducted by popular media house India Today in the name of Mood of the Nation.
The question asked during the survey was: who would be the ideal Prime Ministerial candidate, if at all a grand alliance (Mahaghatbandhan) of all the non-BJP parties, comes to power defeating Narendra Modi. The survey came up with 11 names as Prime Ministerial candidates.
Majority of the respondents who took part in the survey (38 per cent) voted for Rahul Gandhi, followed by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and so on.. in that order.
And Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who claims to be the senior most among the active politicians with four decades of experience, stands at the bottom of the list with only one per cent of the respondents voting for him as the PM candidate.
Interestingly, two per cent of the respondents preferred Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao as the Prime Minister.
Despite being the first time chief minister, KCR stood at seventh position, compared to Naidu.
In any case, Naidu does not want to become the Prime Minister. So, such surveys might not have an impact on him, but it certainly shows the falling popularity graph of Naidu!