With Jubilee Hills MLA Maganti Gopinath and Serilingampally MLA Arekapudi Gandhi formalising their joining the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, and the poll results in Warangal, Khammam and Achampet (Nagara panchayat) presenting a zero for it, time is up for the Telugu Desam Party to pack its bags from Telangana.
The turn of events are nothing but a marching order by the people for the TDP to stay off the State.
The TDP’s oft-repeated rant that it would lose nothing if a few leaders go out of the party as it had the strength of cadre stood exposed as absurd and preposterous with the civic poll results.
The boisterous claims of the TDP using its over-friendly media mouthpieces always remained abstruse. But, ironically for its diehard supporters, the series of humiliations laid bare the shallowness of the bragging. Losing even a nominal presence for a party that was honoured for decades is surely a slap in the face of its leadership and the political chaplains who deliver high-decibel gospels and the bearers of a tilted palanquin.
The sight of NTR Trust Bhavan, which only carries the name of the legendary politician and the greatest showman on silver screen India has produced in the last millennium, is now pathetic and pale.
NTR had never stepped in to the so-called Trust (whatever it means) Bhavan, for it was built after the political phenomenon that carried its name as N T Rama Rao was dead and gone, though he remained immortal in the minds of people.
Telugu Desam, which remained committed to united Andhra Pradesh in the 2004 elections, made a volte-face and joined hands with the TRS by the time the next elections came, more because of existential expediency rather than ideological compulsion.
Among other things, the one letter submitted to then Home Minister Susheel Kumar Shinde by the TDP, only to ensure a smooth passage of Vastunna Mee Kosam padayatra of Chandrababu Naidu through Telangana proved to be a debilitating pill consumed. Kind of a political harakiri, in that. Also, half the trek the leader had trodden had gone to waste.
The subsequent bifurcation, poor showing by the party at the hustings, the rhetoric of its emergence as a national party (silly and ridiculous, that is), the floor-crossing of MLAs and the party MLCs showing the way to their counterparts in the lower House to follow the constitutional procedure seeking a merger into the TRS are a slew of scenes of the non-celluloid kinematic saga.
KCR, the uncrowned supremo of the TRS, did not require media that sings carols and paeans to set the mood and tone for the straight stabbing. Nor did he need a star hotel to stage a coup against his former boss.
KCR proved to emerge as a leader on his own first and then ensured that the TDP hit a cul de sac and could not move in any other direction except to take its natural course of merger into the TRS.
Revanth Reddy, the main accused in the infamous #CashForVote case, is now left with another accused Sandra Venkata Veeraiah and a nonchalant R Krishnaiah in the Telangana unit of the South India’s self-proclaimed national party.
More than the TRS victory, the winning of two divisions by YSR Congress in Khammam, the psychological bastion of the TDP, came as a rude shock to the party leadership in the neighbouring State. Recall the social media buzz by the TDP sympathisers when it won a village panchayat in Adilabad district, which is hardly of any consequence.
Instead of greedy ambitions, the TDP must now mind its own business it is entrusted with in the truncated State of Andhra Pradesh.
