TDP puts up a dummy candidate to help JP in Malkajgiri

Brushing aside a strong pitch from Revanth Reddy for Malkajgiri, Chandrababu Naidu gave the Malkajgiri MP ticket to an outsider unconnected to TDP cadre. The ticket to Telangana native Malla Reddy, an educationalist, brings back memories of TDP handing over the Kukatpally ticket to TRS in 2009 and letting Jayaprakash Narayan sail through when he swept up the settlers votes and got 56,000 votes compared to TRS candidate’s 26,000 votes.

TDP now played the same card and expects the settlers to vote for JP instead of Malla Reddy. This wouldn’t have been the case if Revanth was in fray. He would have took the TDP vote with himself as he has been a starch loyalist to TDP for years. He could have also got some of the Telangana vote posing a stiff challenge to sitting MP Survey Satyanarayana. In addition to this, TDP’s Mynampalli Hanumantha Rao, who was strong contender to Malakajgiri assembly segment which falls within this LS, was also not given a chance and TDP preferred to hand over that seat to BJP! Despite BJP’s insistence that TDP keep Malkajgiri assembly seat and give them a suburb like LB Nagar, TDP didn’t budge. This only confirms the belief that TDP is bent to make JP’s journey’s easy to Lok Sabha. Had Mynampalli worked for TDP, he would have consolidated the TDP vote and that would have even helped the Lok Sabha candidature of Malla Reddy. It is well known that a major media mogul is coordinating these efforts and his newspaper too reported that Naidu and JP spoke over phone to discuss ways to avoid division of votes between TDP and LSP.

In this changed scenario, bulk of settler vote may consolidate behind JP while Telangana vote gets divided between Survey, Malla Reddy and TRS candidate Mynampalli Hanumantha Rao. We have to wait and watch how the campaign pans out and how the vote moves. In the 2009 elections, Survey won around 3,90,000 votes while the TDP candidate won around 2,95,000 votes. The Lok Satta candidate then, a Kamma, got close to 1,10,000 votes. The BJP candidate too got 1,30,000 votes. If the BJP-TDP alliance and this covert support to LSP would consolidate those votes, is to be seen.