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No tie-up with BJP: Naidu

Shireen in Hyderabad

Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu has asserted that his party would not have an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party for the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. However, the BJP state unit leadership is sharply divided on the issue.

Naidu, who is away on a tour of the northern coastal districts, asserted at a media conference at Visakhapatnam on Saturday that the TDP would go it alone in the polls. "We have not been thinking of an alliance with the BJP. The TDP will contest all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state, " he stated categorically even as the pro and anti-alliance protagonists in the BJP gave vent to their feelings at the party's two-day national executive meeting in New Delhi.

Union Minister of State for Urban Affairs and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya and BJP national general secretary and spokesperson M Venkaiah Naidu supported a poll pact with the TDP but state BJP president Ch Vidyasagar Rao and state general secretary P Venugopal Reddy stoutly opposed such an alliance.

Dattatreya claimed that the two parties accounted for almost 50 per cent vote share in the state (with TDP's tally of 32 per cent and BJP's 18 per cent in the 1998 Lok Sabha polls). This would suffice to halt the Congress' march to power, he said. The Congress had won 22 seats in the state and polled more votes than the TDP and BJP put together in only four constituencies -- Machilipatnam, Narsapur, Cuddapah and Narasaraopet. The TDP and BJP could not reap electoral gains last time because they contested the polls on their own, he said.

But Vidyasagar Rao said there was a ''perceptible sympathy wave in favour of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee'' which will help the party in the state. In fact, a tie-up with the TDP might be counter-productive due to Chandrababu Naidu's ''various acts of omission and commission''.

Other state party leaders, including Rajya Sabha member and Dalit Morcha leader Bangaru Laxman, BJP floor leader in the assembly Baddam Bal Reddy and BJP Mahila Morcha leader Shanta Reddy have expressed differing views on a possible alliance with the TDP. All of them, however, felt the party would perform far better than in the last Lok Sabha elections wherein it had bagged four seats.

Meanwhile Congress Working Committee member Kotla Vijayabhaskara Reddy has said that the contribution of the Nehru family to the nation over the last five decades and Vajpayee's failings over the last 14 months would be the key issues in the ensuing polls.

At a media conference in Hyderabad on Saturday, Vijayabhaskara Reddy termed Vajpayee as "the weakest prime minister in India who cannot safeguard the interests of the people and the country". He wondered what good Vajpayee and the BJP coalition government did to the nation except ruining it.

He said that Chandrababu Naidu has become desperate and is launching a tirade against the Congress, particularly its president Sonia Gandhi, because of apprehensions about the TDP's rout in the snap polls.

He said that during the 14-month rule of the BJP coalition, nobody treated Vajpayee as prime minister. "He was yielding to the demands of (Trinamul Congress chief) Mamata Banerjee and (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham general secretary J) Jayalalitha, and lacked the courage to check the harmful actions of (Defence Minister) George Fernandes. Every Tom, Dick and Harry in the coalition was threatening him and that is why we felt that this government should not continue any longer," he pointed out.

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