Political quake

The Assembly election results in Andhra Pradesh are a minor earthquake, not just because they have routed the most highly rated chief minister in the country but also because of what they portend for the Lok Sabha counting on Thursday.

No exit poll had suggested that Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam and allies would do so disastrously as to win only one in every six seats in the Assembly.

If the polls have similarly over-rated support at the national level for the BJP-led alliance, then the shape of national politics will be quite different from what seemed possible a short month ago.

The stock market has responded with shock and dropped something like 4 per cent at the prospect of a hung Parliament and no effective government; public sector stocks have gone into a tailspin because of the fear that privatisation will come to an end.

Ready explanations for the unexpected results should not be taken seriously; if they were so easy to discern today, then they should have been seen before polling took place.

Even the outgoing chief minister did not seem to have realised the possibility of a landslide verdict against him, for why would he then have advanced the elections by six months?

Nevertheless, the possible explanations are the anti-incumbency factor (the TDP has been in office for two terms), the sustained drought in the state causing widespread rural distress, especially to farmers in debt, his jacking up of user charges for services like electricity supply, unemployment and Naidu's centralised decision-making style.

It will be argued by many that Mr Naidu paid the price for pampering his capital city's elite while neglecting the villages, and for pushing ahead with World Bank-style reforms, but this seems too pat an explanation.

For the TDP has done no better in the cities than in the rural constituencies; indeed, even the citizens of Hyderabad who have been the biggest beneficiaries of Mr Naidu's push for an IT revolution, widening of roads and improvement of civic services, have turned away from the TDP.

Similarly, the agitation for a separate Telengana could explain the swing in that region of the state, except that a similar swing has taken place in coastal Andhra, which is the heart of TDP country.

Perhaps it is simply too much to expect that the electorate will re-elect a party for a third successive term "" as the country saw a few months ago in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Whatever the explanation, the next Congress chief minister (presumably Y S Rajasekhar Reddy) would do well not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

He will of course want to set his own priorities, but in the process he should not give up on the advantages that his hardworking predecessor has bequeathed him, for Hyderabad is now on the IT map and should not lose its place on it.

The Congress has the numbers to not be dependent on its electoral allies, nevertheless it will have to decide on its course of action for Telengana. And it must be hoped that the new government will not implement retrograde policies like increasing the subsidies for power supply.