Hyderabad blue in Naidu, KCR dust-up
If the number of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leaders who are out there to defend their leader is anything to go by, there is clearly a clamour to be "His Master's Voice" in the party. Ironical considering that the master's "voice" is at the centre of the controversy. To voice or not to voice is not the dilemma in the party. But letting everyone have a voice has only led to cacophony with everyone speaking in different voices.
Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) MP K Vishweshwar Reddy said to me on Tuesday that the TDP's response to this political bombshell has been as badly managed as the Maggi episode. He is not off the mark. But if Maggi was dumped in two minutes, it took all of 40 seconds for TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu's carefully cultivated image of integrity to come crashing down. Because on tape was his voice, allegedly backing his party colleague's reported attempt to bribe the nominated Anglo-Indian MLA, Elvis Stephenson.
Initially, the response from the government was that it is not Naidu's voice. Then the comedy of errors began. One leader said it is a cut-and-paste job, having picked up Naidu's words uttered on different occasions and mixing them together. Another said a mimicry artist was at work. Yet another defiantly asked so what if he spoke to Stephenson because there is no mention of any money transaction in the audio. And finally, Naidu himself alleged phone tapping which meant he admitted it was indeed his voice.
The TDP strategy is to raise the decibel level on phone tapping so high that it drowns Naidu's alleged involvement in the cash-for-vote scandal. The intention is to make a Ramakrishna Hegde (who resigned as Karnataka CM in the 80s over charges of phone tapping) out of TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao by proving that phones of not just Naidu, but all political foes in Telangana are tapped with the Telangana chief minister's concurrence. In fact, a section of the TDP is confident that the phone tapping case will prove to be KCR's nemesis.
A senior minister in Naidu's cabinet told me that 2,500 phones each are tapped by the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments. "But the difference is that we tap phones of smugglers, robbers and anti-social elements while KCR has ordered tapping of political rivals,'' he said. KCR might as well sing the Salman Khan number, "Main (phone tapping) karoon to saala, character dheela hai.''
KCR believes he has his former boss Naidu on the back foot. The political grapevine has it that he was advised by BJP politicians in Delhi to not go beyond TDP MLA Revanth Reddy. But KCR, being his own man, has seized the opportunity and targeted the top man. KCR's calculation is that this would effectively shut Naidu's shop in Telangana.
The TDP also smells YSR Congress chief Jaganmohan Reddy's hand in this "conspiracy". Its irrigation minister D Umamaheswara Rao alleged that Elvis Stephenson is close to Brother Anil, who is Jagan's brother-in-law. He also alleged that KCR is jealous that Singapore and Japan are helping Naidu build the Andhra capital and therefore he is putting a spanner in the works. The list of imaginative conspiracy theories go on. One more talks of how the cameras used for sting operation were loaned from T-News (KCR's channel) and Sakshi TV (Jagan's channel).
But even as KCR is sitting pretty, the fact remains that he has not been a paragon of virtue either. He has used the muscle of power to woo TDP and Congress MLAs to the TRS in the last one year, throwing political ethics to the winds. "What is ethics in politics,'' a TRS minister said when I asked him this. He called it "political realignment''.
Where do Naidu and KCR go from here? Naidu is looking to Delhi for help, asking the NDA government to implement section 8 of the AP Reorganisation Act, which empowers the governor with handling law and order in the common capital area of Hyderabad. Naidu is trying to say that a citizen who has his roots in Andhra is not safe in Hyderabad, which falls in the geographical area of Telangana. It is unlikely that Delhi or even people back home will buy this. And even if Delhi tries to back Naidu, it will meet with stiff resistance from the TRS.
The pro-TRS media is already talking of more recorded conversations, talking of bribes offered to more MLAs by senior TDP leaders. If the idea is to keep the TDP on tenterhooks, it has succeeded in it to a large extent. Clearly picture abhi baaki hai.