The enduring legacy of one of the poster boys of state-level reforms is also built on a myth—that Naidu focused only on the state capital and on IT while ignoring the countryside, thereby losing the assembly elections of 2004. The truth is that Naidu worked tirelessly to improve irrigation and water management, encouraged the creation of thousands of village self-help groups of women who were able to get bank finance as a result, emphasised rural development, and ensured that subsidised rice reached more homes in Andhra Pradesh than in any other state, by overseeing the smooth functioning of the public distribution system.
When in office, Naidu repeatedly spoke of his belief that the voters would recognise and reward performance. Indeed they did, for he got re-elected once, in 2000. But in 2004, he and his Telugu Desam Party were trounced to such a degree that he is still to recover his poise and effectiveness. The easy caricature (elitist reformer ignored the villages and paid the price) does injustice to Naidu.
Whether it was a political mistake or not, Naidu will always be associated with putting Hyderabad on the national and world maps. He inherited it as an overgrown backwater, with crowded roads and chaotic traffic, a poor cousin to Bengaluru and Chennai. Naidu set about changing that with a vengeance. While IT companies came swarming to the state, industrial investment passed him by. Since other manufacturing investment also did not materialise, the state’s tax revenues were far from buoyant—export-driven IT, after all, pays no taxes! Indeed, even the state’s GDP remained stubbornly middle-of-the-road, as did its performance on the human development index.
Naidu inherited—some say usurped—the Telugu Desam when he upstaged his father-in-law and the party’s populist founder, N T Rama Rao, and replaced him as Chief Minister. Where Rama Rao offered subsidised rice and clothes as his election calling card, Naidu emphasised development and investment in the future. But perhaps more important than the shift in emphasis was Naidu’s centralised style of functioning, throwing out or sidelining elements that were loyal to Rama Rao. But he proved more in his element as Chief Minister than as leader of the opposition, opting for a needless hardline stance that did not sit well with his earlier image.
Sensing that his alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party might have lost him the Muslim vote, Naidu withdrew from the National Democratic Alliance. But that has left him searching for new alliance partners, since his primary contest in the state is with the Congress. So he has once again tried to push the on-off idea of a ‘third front’, and conducted initial parleys with a bunch of strange bedfellows, including the communists who want him to rewrite his economic programme. Whether the ‘third front’ will gain momentum, or whether Naidu will eventually find himself back in the lap of the BJP, is now the critical question.
©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009; available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in
The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony
