NTV Chowdary to join BJP?

Promoter of popular Telugu television channel NTV Narendra Chowdary might join Bharatiya Janata party sooner or later, in order to prevent forcible acquisition of channel by industrialists close to the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi.

Sources said Chowdary, who is presently in the United States of America to take part in the Telugu Association of North America (TANA) conferences, held preliminary rounds of talks with BJP general secretary Ram Madhav who attended the conference as a guest.

Sources said NTV has quite a few small time investors in the channel. Apparently, the TRS leadership is trying to acquire all those shares one after the other through industrialists close to it, so that they would ultimately take over the channel.

In order to pre-empt these attempts, NTV Chowdary is trying to bring pressure through the BJP on these investors to sell their stakes to BJP leaders.

Apparently, a national channel network owned by BJP MP will acquire these shares, while Chowdary will continue to retain his stake.

Once Chowdary gets the BJP backing, he can take on the TRS strongly. For that, the BJP leadership is understood to have offered a good position to Chowdary.

Though there were reports that Chowdary might sell his entire stake to the BJP MP, sources said there was no truth in the reports.

While he continues to have the majority stake, he will take the pro-BJP stand that would benefit him in the long run, sources said.