Ever since Telugu Desam Party president N. Chandrababu Naidu returned from his New Delhi tour after meeting Union Home Minister Amit Shah last week, there have been speculations that the Bharatiya Janata Party is demanding more MP and MLA tickets in the Andhra Pradesh elections if Naidu wants the party to join the TDP-Jana Sena Party alliance.
Though there has been no official communication yet from the TDP, BJP, or even Jana Sena Party regarding the alliance, let alone seat sharing, sources suggest that the BJP doesn’t have a good number of candidates to contest the elections, even though it is asking for more seats.
In the last 24 hours, a list of probable candidates has been circulating, but only for four MP seats and eight MLA seats. According to this list, the BJP has finalized the candidatures of G. V. L. Narasimha Rao for Visakhapatnam, Daggubati Purandeshwari for Rajahmundry, Sujana Chowdary for Vijayawada, and N. Kiran Kumar Reddy for Rajampet parliamentary constituencies.
For the assembly seats, the BJP has chosen P. Vishnu Kumar Raju for Visakhapatnam (North), Somu Veerraju for Rajahmundry (Urban), Manepalli Ayyaji Varma for P. Gannavaram, Dr. Kamineni Srinivas for Kaikaluru, Valluru Jayaprakash for Guntur (West), G. Bhanuprakash Reddy for Srikalahasti, Adinarayana Reddy for Jammalmadugu, and Varadapuram Suri for Dharmavaram.
It is not immediately known whether this list has been finalized after discussions with the TDP chief or if the BJP proposed these names to Naidu.
In any case, the BJP is trying to present an aggressive posture before the TDP-BJP combine, but in reality, it doesn’t have any candidates.
