It’s Yatra time in Andhra Pradesh, starting Thursday. The ruling YSR Congress party leaders will hit the streets with their bus yatras. They will be taken up in three regions of the state and on the move for more than two months.
Simultaneously, Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu’s wife Nara Bhuvaneshwari will be kickstarting her yatra, starting from Kuppam on Wednesday, to mobilise public opinion in Naidu’s favour.
It’s a sort of Odarpu Yatra, aimed at consoling the families of the TDP supporters who died of shock or committed suicide following Naidu’s arrest in the skill development scam more than 45 days ago. But the real intention is to gain sympathy for her husband and get some political mileage to the TDP.
Jagan wants his ministers and party leaders to cover the entire state before Naidu comes out of the jail on bail, so that the TDP would be lagging behind in the public outreach campaign.
While the aim of the yatras is to explain to the people the good work that the state government had done for all sections of society, including Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), the Backward Classes (BCs), the minorities, and the poor, the final objective is to consolidate the YSRC vote bank at the grassroots level.
Jagan is very keen that the entire state should talk about the YSRCP government and the programmes it had taken up, all the time. He asked all his 17 ministers to go all out to intensify the programme so that there will be no breathing space for the TDP.
At the end of the day, there would public meetings for the party leaders to address. They would be presided by the MLAs of the constituency concerned.
If the YSRCP does not have an MLA in a constituency where the bus yatra is on the move, the Assembly segment in charge of the party would chair the meeting. All the meetings would be addressed from the top of the buses.
According to the TDP leaders, Bhuvaneswari would hit the roads to solidify the party's file protest against the "illegal" arrest with her “Nijam Gelavali” (truth will win) Yatra.
The TD leaders said that as part of Nijam Gelavali, Bhuvaneswari would be visiting the kin of 105 party activists who "died of shock" after the September 9 arrest of Naidu.
“This will be followed by a series of programmes by her; and if Naidu comes out of jail in the meantime, he will pick up the baton,” they said.