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Left continues trying to rope in seculars in AP

Shireen in Hyderabad

The Left has decided to continue its efforts to forge a broad front with secular and democratic organisations against the Telugu Desam, Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress in Andhra Pradesh.

Though such attempts have been set back in the last couple of days with the two breakaway TDP factions led by N Harikrishna and N Lakshmi Parvathi working out their own electoral alliances, the Communist leaders refuse to give up.

Anna Telugu Desam Party president Nandamuri Harikrishna, son of the late TDP founder N T Rama Rao, has already announced that he will ally with the Nationalist Congress Party and Samajwadi Party for the Lok Sabha and legislative assembly polls.

Harikrishna made it known that the ATDP would keep away from the Communist Party of India if the latter entered into any understanding with the Congress. He also ruled out any alliance with the 14-party Mahajan Front if it allies with the NTR-TDP led by his stepmother Lakshmi Parvathi.

He, however, reiterated that the poll understanding with the Bahujan Samaj Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist) would continue because they were committed to fight the Congress as well as the TDP and BJP.

Harikrishna pointed out that the ATDP and its new allies, the NCP and SP, would contest all the 42 Lok Sabha and 294 assembly seats in the state if no electoral understanding with the Left and BSP comes about.

The Mahajan Front too has declared that the talks with the Left on forging a third political alternative in the state have failed. The front and the NTR-TDP leaders could not convince the Left to join a broad-based political alternative.

"The ATDP is also hostile to any sort of poll tie-up with NTR-TDP. The CPI indicated that it is in favour of an understanding with the Congress to defeat the BJP and TDP. The CPI-M has taken a slightly different stand," Mahajan Front honorary president M Omkar said.

In this scenario, the NTR-TDP and the Mahajan Front -- comprising the Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi, a pressure group of the Madiga community among scheduled castes that demands categorisation of SC reservations into A, B, C & D categories, the Marxist-Communist Party of India, the Communist Party-Marxist faction led by former MP B N Reddy, and other caste-based organisations -- have decided to contest all the 42 Lok Sabha and 294 assembly seats.

But the communist parties know that the ATDP and the NTR-TDP do not have the wherewithal to contest the poll on their own and that the constituents of the Mahajan Front have only marginal existence in the state. The NTR-TDP, which had contested the Lok Sabha poll in 1996, was totally marginalised in the 1998 election when it fielded candidates in just four constituencies.

The Anna-TDP, on the other hand, is yet to make its electoral debut, as it was floated as late as in January 1999. Moreover, both Lakshmi Parvathi and Harikrishna are treated as "mavericks" in political circles.

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