While YS Jagan Mohan Reddy winning the 2019 elections may not come as a surprise to many, what indeed amazed the people of the State and even the country was the margin of victory.
The YSRCP won 151 out of 175 Assembly seats and 22 out of 25 Lok Sabha seats.
The TDP won 23 Assembly and 3 Lok Sabha seats, a shocking performance that Chandrababu Naidu might not have anticipated even in his wildest dreams.
Naturally, there will be many factors behind such a victory, the primary one being YS Jagan himself.
His back-breaking Padayatra firmly established his presence at the grassroots level with the people of the State.
In fact, many people might not be able to name more than 10 winning candidates from the YSRCP even today; it was solely YS Jagan who was the face of the Party and people blindly voted for whoever contested on the YSRCP ticket.
The second most important reason is the extreme revulsion that people started to feel for the TDP Party and by association, the Kamma community.
The biggest blunder of Chandrababu Naidu was ‘Amaravati’. For a cash-starved Andhra Pradesh, there was absolutely no necessity to start the construction of a new capital from scratch. One of the existing cities could easily have been made the capital.
Grabbing fertile lands from farmers was a move that did not find favour with any section of society.
Chandrababu knew beforehand that the capital would come up at Amaravati but he conveyed the impression that it would come elsewhere.
Meanwhile, he and his henchmen and other Kamma businessmen bought huge tracts of land from farmers in Amaravati from farmers at throwaway prices.
When Amaravati was finally declared as the capital, the value of those lands skyrocketed.
What’s more, Chandrababu made certain that the lands acquired by his coterie did not fall in the ‘land pooling’ category.
Signing a deal with a Singapore company that was no way favourable to the State also gave rise to the impression that Chandrababu was using Amaravati as a pretext to legitimize his ‘Black money’ in Singapore that was being pumped into Amaravati.
At no point of time did people feel a sense of belonging or solidarity with Amaravati and it came to be referred to as Kammavati (Capital of the Kammas).
This coupled with the unnecessary Pattiseema, Polavaram scam, the disgusting lip-flops on the SCS issue etc; etc generated a high-level of anti-incumbency.
The yellow media however vigorously defended the government further angering the people against the community.
And, there are social reasons as well. Any non-Kamma graduate from Kamma strongholds such as Siddhartha College, Vijayawada and other Kamma-owned educational establishments will vouch for the level of discrimination, arrogance and apathy towards non-Kamma communities indulged in by the Kamma students there.
If this is the situation at the grassroots level, one can easily imagine the attitude of this community in other aspects where they tend to consolidate themselves and usurp all the resources at the expense of other communities.
And this phenomenon is not restricted to India alone. Overseas, organisations like TANA etc have become their playthings facing numerous allegations of bias and corruption.
All this distaste for the community finally found expression in the form of the 2019 mandate given by the people.
If the Kammas find themselves emotionally ostracized by the people of Andhra Pradesh, they have only themselves to blame.
Until they learn to respect and gel with the rest of the communities and take them along on the path of development, they will find it immensely difficult to regain their lost ground or the love and affection of the people of Andhra Pradesh.
(Venkat Arikatla can be reached at [email protected])
