It was a keenly fought battle between the YSR Congress party and the Telugu Desam Party in the maiden elections to the two-year-old Kuppam municipality in Chittoor district, polling for which was held on Monday.
As per the indications available from the ground zero, the YSRC is going to sweep nearly 80-90 per cent of seats in Kuppam municipality, thereby virtually wiping out the TDP from its bastion.
An exit poll conducted by some local agencies in Kuppam revealed that the YSRCP would get a minimum of 20 seats and a maximum of 22 seats in the 25-member municipality, whereas the TDP would end up with just three to five seats.
If the exit polls results are to be believed, the Kuppam municipal election is going to spell doom for the TDP and it will be the end of the road for Naidu himself in his own constituency.
In fact, in 2019 assembly elections itself, he faced a moral defeat, as his majority shrunk from 50,000 votes in 2014 to 30,000 votes.
After the upgradation of the major panchayat of Kuppam into a municipality in 2019, the YSRC focussed on this municipality, after systematically capturing the constituency right from gram panchayats to MPTCs to ZPTCs.
In the last two and a half years, panchayat raj minister Peddireddy Ramachandra Reddy visited Kuppam half a dozen times and his son and Rajampeta MP P Mithun Reddy, too made quite a few promises to the people of Kuppam, including supply of drinking water to the villages.
On the other hand, the TDP cadres are completely in a state of despair due to lack of any proper leadership, which was seen as the prime reason of the TDP’s debacle in the MPTC, ZPTC and panchayat elections.
Though the recent visit of Naidu to Kuppam appeared to have enthused the cadre to some extent, the party has lost strength to face the onslaught of the YSRC.
