Andhra Pradesh - Guntur   

Confident Alapati on the move again

By Ramesh Susarla

GUNTUR, MAY 1. "Anti-incumbency, where is it?'' asks the former Minister and Vemuru Telugu Desam Party (TDP) nominee, Alapati Rajendra Prasad, for whom jotting down the minute details of voting pattern in each colony in his constituency has become a daily ritual since Monday while talking to the scores of village heads and community leaders.

Two cellular phones and a land line remain engaged on any given day, but this being the post-poll season, a majority of calls he receives are words of assurance from groups of women. For majority of people in villages, he is just `Raja' and they have voted for him just because he cares for them when they are in need.

It is a week since the canvassing stopped officially, but he continues to visit at least three villages a day and keeps reading the faces of voters while he wishes them with a folded hand. He does not go wrong by a large margin, when he compares his estimates with the reports of local leaders.

"Entire Krishna delta has voted for the TDP and the non-release of water for the crops here has worked against the Congress right from Mangalagiri to Repalle and not the TDP as is being perceived,'' he opines. He does not approve of the theories being floated by several people that the voting pattern could be different for Assembly and parliamentary constituencies.

Excepting for a minuscule percentage of voters in the urban pockets none has gone to polling stations analysing the pro and cons of policies or the issues, and the merit of local candidates also did not matter much, he said it was only on the party symbol that majority had voted.

Predicting a large majority for the former MP, Ummareddy Venkateswarlu, he said the veteran politician would get a majority equivalent to double the margin of votes by which he wins.

The calculations at the cosy sit-out in his house are based only on the voting pattern on caste lines. "This is what matters in villages and makes or breaks a candidate,'' he believes while adding or deleting a certain percentage of votes of a particular community in a village.

While he discounts 25 per cent of votes from his own community to be on the safer side, he does not take into account 20 per cent of votes of other communities though he is sure of getting more of them as he feels it is they who would see him through these elections. At the end of jugglery of numbers he comfortably romps home with a margin large enough to kill all his worries.

What about his party forming government. He retorts, "Why did you get the doubt at all?'' Will he be part of the Cabinet again. "We better end the discussion here,'' is his cryptic reply.

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