Congress sweeps aside Andhra CEO

Congress-TRS alliance win 226 seats, TDP-BJP alliance settle with 49 seats.

After 10 years in opposition, the Congress today swept back to power in Andhra Pradesh and raised the possibility of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) trying to form a minority government.

The shock and awe of the Telugu Desam Party's (TDP's) rout in Andhra Pradesh had even seasoned NDA managers worried. "We didn't expect this result," Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) General Secretary Arun Jaitley said.

Besting the most optimistic predictions by the exit polls, the Congress-Telangana Rashtra Samiti alliance bagged 226 seats in the 294 Andhra Pradesh Assembly. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti made its electoral debut in style, winning 26 of the 42 seats it contested.

The Desam-BJP combine had to contend with a mere 49 seats. N Chandrababu Naidu, the outgoing Telugu Desam chief minister, admitted that he did not expect the Congress sweep in Hyderabad and surrounding areas, where development was visible.

In a day of rapid developments, NDA Convener George Fernandes met Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to discuss the results. Middle managers in the BJP were engaged all day in trying to convince the party leadership that the NDA should get a fighting chance to form even a minority government and add numbers to the alliance later.

But the question is how the alliance will make up for the Telugu Desam's rout. Rather than depend on small parties that render the management of alliances difficult, the feeling among the party's middle managers is that it is the biggies in Uttar Pradesh that the NDA should target""the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.

However, the Bahujan Samaj Party has let it be known that it will seek a price for support: it will like a strong position by the BJP on Mulayam Singh Yadav. The BJP has translated this to mean the Bahujan Samaj Party will eventually like the Union government to dismiss the Samajwadi Party-led  government in Uttar Pradesh.

The Bahujan Samaj Party, sources said, would find it untenable to support the NDA with the prime minister making statements that there was no ideological difference between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. However, the BJP said it would wait to see which of the two parties got the larger number before making its move.

The other possible breakaways are the Pattali Makkal Katchi  and the Marulamarachi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which are uncomfortable in a Congress alliance. Fernandes is likely to make contact with these groups.

Fernandes made a quick visit to Mumbai to call on Sharad Pawar to discuss the possibility of a tie-up. The problem is that the Shiv Sena has said it will walk out of the alliance if Pawar is part of it.

The Congress, by contrast, has put out that it is not going to be part of this frenzied activity. It held a strategy meeting that decided to stay away from "official contact" with the "undecided", until it got some idea of whether it was in the running to form a government.