K VP Ramachandra Rao, close friend and a trusted adviser to former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, once said, “YSR is the sun and I am only a satellite. The light around me will be there only till he is there.” Ironically, the spotlight has been on Rao ever since the death of YSR, as the former chief minister was known, in a helicopter crash on September 2.
A soft-spoken and reserved person, KVP stayed in the background all through his 43-year-old association with YSR. But the tragic accident has brought this Rajya Sabha member into the limelight because of his mission to make YSR’s son, YS Jaganmohan Reddy the chief minister.
The friendship between YSR and KVP, 59, dates back to the days when they were both students of MR Medical College at Gulbarga in Karnataka. It all started with YSR protecting KVP, who was a year junior to him, from being ragged. Later, according to a former student of the college, KVP worked hard to ensure that YSR won the students’ union elections and has been the backroom boy for his friend’s rise to political power for the past 30 years. He is the genius behind the 1,500-km padayatra in the summer of 2003 which laid the foundation for YSR’s spectacular election victory a year later. He was in charge of Gandhi Bhavan, the state headquarters of Congress, when YSR was the Pradesh Congress Committee president in 1983.
KVP used to interact with Congress workers at the grassroots level. Like YSR, he is a medical doctor turned politician who knows the pulse of the people. However, KVP is not a mass leader and way back in 1979, he unsuccessfully contested an election. That was his only foray into direct elections.
Though he is friendly with the media, KVP maintains a deliberate low profile. He is known to keep his cool and never gets ruffled barring one occasion in 2005 when he filed a defamation suit against Telugu Desam Party leader, Kodela Sivaprasad, for calling him “Vasool Raja” ( money collector) and AP’s “own Sasikala” (AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa’s controversial aide who hit the headlines for financial peccadilloes).
That KVP did not have a political agenda of his own also helped their friendship flourish: YSR’s interests were his interests. It was an open secret that YSR never took a major decision without consulting KVP.
Whenever they were in town, they used to have lunch together.
YSR did repay his friend with some public office. He made KVP the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Public Affairs, Public Utilities and Public Welfare Activities and also a member of the Rajya Sabha. It became almost mandatory for party leaders, including ministers, and also officials to meet KVP first before approaching the chief minister.
Not surprisingly, KVP holds sway over majority of the state Cabinet members and MLAs even after the death of YSR. An overwhelming majority of the 156 Congress MLAs, who were elected in the 2009 elections, were YSR loyalists and KVP was instrumental in shortlising the candidates, particularly the 74 MLAs who were first-timers.
These loyalists lost no time in demanding that Jaganmohan Reddy should be made the chief minister. They launched a signature campaign even before the body of YSR was brought from Kurnool district (where he died) to the state capital.
All this irked the Congress high command. It reportedly felt that KVP was behind the orchestration of support to Jaganmohan Reddy and summoned him to Delhi. KVP is now sweating it out in Delhi explaining that the demand was spontaneous and had not been engineered. However, the Congress leadership kept the successor issue in suspension.
KVP’s current goal is to make Jaganmohan Reddy the chief minister. More than anything else, according to people close to him, he wants to do it as a tribute to his late friend YSR who had been grooming his son as his political successor. Will he succeed? It remains to be seen.
However, if we look at his track record, one thing is certain. He is unlikely to withdraw his efforts in this regard. For three decades, he did the spadework to pave the way for YSR to become chief minister and there is no reason to believe he will not do the same now to ensure that the son of the departed leader occupies the coveted position.
