Chandrababu Naidu is trying to further consolidate the party's position among the BCs by nominating two leaders from the community.
Published Mar 10, 2025 | 1:47 PM ⚊ Updated Mar 10, 2025 | 1:47 PM
Election. Representative Image. (iStock)
Synopsis: The NDA alliance in Andhra Pradesh has decided that three out of the five MLC vacancies under MLAs’ quota, three will be given to the TDP and one each to the Jana Sena and the BJP. In Telangana, Congress is fielding three candidates and the CPI is allotted one seat. The BRS in Telangana is also fielding a candidate.
The majority of the five MLC seats in Andhra Pradesh under the MLA quota will go to the TDP, which is leading the NDA government in the state.
TDP will field three candidates, as announced by Chief Minister N Chandrabbau Naidu on Sunday, 9 March, while the Jana Sena and the BJP will field one candidate each.
All three candidates of the TDP will file their nomination papers on Monday, the last day to submit the forms.
Meanwhile, in Telangana, of the five MLC seats under the MLA quota, the Congress is contesting only three seats after leaving one seat to its alliance partner CPI. The fifth seat will go to the BRS, which has the strength to get only one seat.
TDP supremo Naidu announced the names of the three candidates late night on Sunday. TDP general secretaries Beeda Ravichandra from Nellore district and BT Naidu from Kurnool district, both belonging to backwards class (BC) communities, will be fielded alongside Kavali Greeshma from Srikakulam district.
Greeshma is the daughter of former Andhra Pradesh Assembly speaker K Pratibha Bharati. who belongs to a Scheduled Caste (SC) community.
For Jana Sena, Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan’s brother, Naga Babu, has already filed his nomination papers, while the BJP has yet to announce its candidate.
Party state president D Purandeswari is understood to have done some groundwork. The announcement is being delayed because it has to come from the party’s national leadership. The frontrunners are former BJP state president Somu Veeraraju and former MLC PVN Madhav.
Chandrababu Naidu is trying to further consolidate the party’s position among the BCs by nominating two leaders from the community.
Beeda Ravichandra is the brother of TDP Rajya Sabha MP Beda Mastan Rao. They belong to the Yadav community.
BT Naidu is from the Valmiki (Boya) community and has been with the TDP through its thick and thin.
When it hit a rough patch in 2023 following the arrest of the then-Leader of Opposition in Andhra Pradesh Assembly N Chandrababu Naidu, BT Naidu stayed put in Rajahmundry and communicated messages from the party supremo to the party cadres. He has been with the party since 1994.
Chandrababu Naidu held elaborate discussions with party leaders before finalising the candidates, as the probables’ list for the coveted positions was quite long.
The chief minister, keen on nurturing the BC communities, which is TDP’s backbone, has been taking measures to enlist their support. Even though there have been several aspirants who genuinely needed to be accommodated in the council, Naidu opted for BCs for two seats.
He also struck a regional balance, as Beeda Ravichandra is from the South coastal district of the state, BT Naidu is from Kurnool, a Rayalaseema district, and Kavali Greeshma is from North Coastal Andhra.
Naidu handpicked Greeshma for the third berth not only because she is an SC from the North Andhra district of Srikakulam but also because she was part of Nara Lokesh’s team when the party was in Opposition.
Greeshma has been very active since the bifurcation of the state in 2014 and defended the party despite heavy odds during the YSRCP rule. She is the incumbent chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Women’s Cooperative Finance Corporation.
The selection of the candidates has thrown a wet blanket on the senior leaders of the party who had thought the party would reward them with berths in the Legislative Council. Those who have been sidelined include former finance minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu.
He has, of late, been very unhappy with the developments in the TDP and even wrote an open letter to Naidu, advising him to strive to reconnect with the foundational principles of the party to regain public trust, implying that the party was digressing from them.
Party leaders said Ramakrishnudu was not renominated to the Council because his daughter Divya is already an MLA in addition to his relative Putta Sudhakar Yadav being an MLA from Mydukuru, and his son-in-law Putta Mahesh Kumar the Eluru MP.
Others who could not find favor with Chandrababu Naidu include Duvvarapu Rama Rao, former MLC Parchuri Ashok Babu, and former Minister Devineni Umamaheswara Rao.
Umamaheswara Rao had sacrificed his Myalvaram seat in the 2024 Assembly elections to make room for Vasanta Venkata Krishna Prasad, who defected to the TDP ahead of the elections.
There were also prominent names, including Vangaveeti Radhakrishna and former Pithapuram MLA SVSN Varma, who made room for Pawan Kalyan to contest after the seat was allotted to Jana Sena in the alliance.
Party seniors are trying to mollify them with assurances that they would be considered in the next round of elections to the Council, two years from now.
In Telangana, the Congress sprang a surprise by selecting film actress and former MP Vijaya Shanti, who had been migrating from one party to another throughout her career and finally returned to the Congress ahead of the Assembly elections in 2023.
Since she is a woman, a good speaker, and belongs to a BC community, the party seemed to have decided in her favour. Apart from that, she was promised an important position at the time of rejoining the Congress.
Manikrao Thakre, who was the party’s Telangana in-charge then, had made a promise to her to that effect, which the party has honored now.
Of the remaining two seats, one is allotted to Addanki Dayakar from the SC community, for whom it has always been a slip between the cup and the lip. He sought the ticket from Thungathurthy in Nalgonda district in the 2023 Assembly elections but it went to someone else, and in 2024, he aspired to a nomination for the Warangal Lok Sabha seat, but again it eluded him.
Finally, Dame Fortune smiled on him. He had also fought and lost Assembly elections in 2014 and 2018 from Thungathurthy. He is a staunch supporter of Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy.
The selection of Nalgonda district Congress president K Shankar Naik, a protégé of senior Congress leader K Jana Reddy, is also in line with the party’s recent stress on rewarding those who have remained loyal to the party through its thick and thin.
Shankar Naik, a tribal, has been with the party since 1998. He started his career in Congress as Damaracherla mandal president. Interestingly, the party ignored the forward caste communities this time, a departure from tradition.
The CPI has announced its Nalgonda District Secretary Nellikanti Satyam as its candidate for the seat allotted to it as part of the alliance with the Congress.
The party wanted to field him from Munugode in Nalgonda district in the 2023 Assembly elections but could not, as the seat went to the Congress as part of the alliance.
The CPI, which had sought two Assembly seats then, could get only one — Kothagudem — and was promised that one MLC seat would be allotted to its candidate. Accordingly, the fourth seat went to Satyam.
As regards the BRS, its candidate will be Dr Dasoju Sravan, who seems to be out of the woods after his nomination to the council by the-then BRS cabinet in July 2023 was stuck in limbo after the-then Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan set it aside on technical grounds.
Even though Dasoju fought a protracted legal battle, he could not get any relief. Since he had been defending the party relentlessly after the Congress came to power, party chief K Chandrashekar Rao seemed to have rewarded him.
Initially, it was thought that Chandrashekar Rao would nominate senior party leader RS Praveen Kumar or tribal woman leader Satyavathi Rathod. However, it was Dasoju who got the party chief’s nod.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
