It is now pretty evident that the Bharatiya Janata Party is keen on emerging as a strong political force in Andhra Pradesh by the next assembly elections. It wants to be the principal opposition, if not coming to power immediately.
But the party leadership knows it does not have enough strength of its own in Andhra Pradesh, as the people had rejected it for ditching the state on special category status issue.
The BJP could get around 0.87 per cent vote share in the recent elections.
However, the party feels the anger will no longer be there by next elections and the Narendra Modi factor that is sweeping all parts of the country would spread to AP as well.
In order to strengthen itself in AP, the BJP is trying to destabilise the Telugu Desam Party gradually and occupy its place as the main opposition in the coming years.
As part of that, it has started luring senior leaders from the TDP, as was evident from the defection of four Rajya Sabha members – Y S Chowdary, CM Ramesh, T G Venkatesh and G Mohan Rao.
According to BJP sources, the party has entrusted the responsibility of splitting the TDP to Y S Chowdary, better known as Sujana Chowdary.
“Nobody knows better than Sujana the weaknesses of the TDP MLAs and other leaders. He has been asked to lure as many MLAs and other potential leaders as possible to BJP using money power,” a BJP source said.
Apparently, Sujana was promised with a cabinet berth if can split the TDP vertically and bring a good number of MLAs into the BJP.
“He has been silently working on that mission. You will see the developments in this regard very soon,” the BJP leader said.
