Year after year, it is a celebration for the Telugu Desam Party. Every March 29 is a day of pride for most of the party workers. The foundation day of the party is never ignored. The founder’s birthday – May 28, its preceding and succeeding days are when the party celebrates its annual jamboree, Mahanadu. The scale and size of the event may vary depending on the mood, but never have the anniversary or Mahanadu been ignored or “observed customarily”. They are celebrated with gusto, pomp and gaiety.
What if the TDP celebrates its birthdays regularly? How is it relevant now? Maybe, we may connect it to its upcoming 34th birthday towards the end of this month.
No. I am not talking about what happens regularly. Nor am I interested in discussing the glory and grandeur of the TDP, at least, now.
What I want to drive home is something else. I have an intense desire to spurn what doesn’t happen annually.
Who are they trying to take for a ride?
Yes, I am talking about Mr Yeduguri Sandhinti Jaganmohan Reddy, the Honourable Leader of the Opposition in Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly and president of the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party.
Before I get down to pouring scorn, I would like to have a few words of advise and encouragement for the embattled leader, famously known and dearly called as Jagan, though I am not a Polonius, nor is Jagan Laertes in Hamlet.
But the Hamletian dilemma whether or not to say these few words continues to bother me. Yet, as a political commentator, I cannot but go forth to offer this unsolicited advise.
The people’s vote should never be belittled. Whether they voted for you or vetoed your contest, they indeed honoured you as a wrestler in the political amphitheater. Live up to their expectations and win over their hearts, man. Do not shirk your onus of being there and doing that. Leave the rest to popular decision. But don’t leave an impression that you are a windbag and hopeless. Portray yourself as an optimist, a chronic one in that.
What had Polonius told his son?
Give thy thoughts no tongue
… give every man thy ear, but few thy voice…
Those friends thou hast,and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d,unfledged comrade.
BewareOf entrance to a quarrel;
but being in,Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Each one of these advises would surely suit this man, Jagan, who is ambitious, if not greedy. Is he gripped by ambiguity? Maybe, yes. Does he underestimate the strength of his enemies? Largely, yes.
Give thy thoughts no tongue. This rule was clearly flouted and Jagan paid a price perilous to his party and fantastic to his bête noire. His oblique reference to numbers that make up for the majority to stage a coup against the incumbent dispensation recoiled. Result: He lost eight MLAs to his rival. Had he not given voice to his weird thoughts, he wouldn’t have lost those MLAs.
Grappling the friends close to his heart with a steel grip is the last thing Jagan is capable of. None of those who had sailed with his father YS Rajasekhara Reddy and with himself in his formative days of founding his political party can be seen around this young politico.
“I will append my first signature, second signature, fifth signature .. and so on.” This irritating rhetoric by him during the electioneering only resembled a reverie. No sane leader would have said: “Once I become the Chief Minister…”
He somehow never had that wise counsel of telling the people his party’s priorities in the manifesto and that the legislators would elect the Chief Minister.
This is where he had failed to realise the nuances of the entrance to the battle and that his opponents would take every necessary precaution to keep him at bay.
Why all this now? Jagan’s fledgling YSR Congress celebrated its sixth anniversary on March 12. But the hero of the party isn’t seen around. It was celebrated like a nondescript annual festival of some insignificant event. Mekapati Rajamohan Reddy, Botsa Satyanarayana and Ummareddy Venkateswarlu were those senior faces seen around.
The first YSRCLP leader and his mother YS Vijayalakshmi and his sister Sharmila who indeed did everything humanly possible to her incarcerated brother were conspicuously absent.
The YSR Congress party, which could edge out the Grand Old Party of India from the political canvas of the truncated State of Andhra Pradesh in the elections, didn’t even think of building a second line up of leadership as yet.
Fools, they say, learn from experience and the wise from history.
Before staging the palace coup and heading for a showdown with the legendary NTR, Chandrababu Naidu did the prep the hardest way building cadres for the party up to the grass roots and making it an unassailable and invincible political force. Despite being out of power for a decade, it’s this strength that kept its sagging morale pent up.
It’s not tucked in some legendary Greek history or Chaldean civilisation. The oeuvre of building a party is right in front of the eyes. Look at the TDP.
Six years of existence for a political party without any organisational hierarchy and internal elections is surely a feat. This isn’t in the nature of democratic politics. It is indeed against it. Thus far, Jagan is lucky. When he has the Sword of Damocles hanging ominously on his head and too many politicos inimical to him, the YSRC leader’s bravado in not having any org structure in place and not letting others speak in the Assembly make everyone unnerved.
It is Jaganmohan Reddy’s responsibility to provide a promising future for his party by building it up from the scratch, at least now.
Wish you many happy returns of the day, YSR Congress.
