The maiden election to the two-year-old Kuppam Municipality with 25 wards and 39,000 voters is all set to witness a battle between the ruling YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP).
Till the 2019 Assembly elections, the Kuppam region remained a bastion of TDP national president N. Chandrababu Naidu. Since 1989, the question of the TDP losing in Kuppam never arose. However, the fall in the winning margin of Mr. Naidu from 50,000 in 2014 to 30,000 in 2019 shook the morale of the party cadres.
The YSRCP cadres in Kuppam led by Panchayat Raj Minister P. Ramachandra Reddy are now looking at Mr. Naidu’s bastion as a ‘crumbling fort’ which can be captured easily. Now, the maiden municipal election in Kuppam is the right time to invade Mr. Naidu’s citadel, so goes the mood of the ruling party cadres. However, political experts say the TDP cadres, that seem to be in the doldrums, got a morale boost after Mr. Naidu’s two-day Kuppam tour on October 29 and 30.
The major panchayat of Kuppam was upgraded into a municipality in 2019. The civic body, with population of 65 lakh in nine panchayats, has been divided into 25 wards. Of the total 39,261 voters, women (19,891) are slightly more than men.
During the last two and a half years of the YSRCP’s tenure, Minister P. Ramachandra Reddy has visited Kuppam half a dozen times. His son and Rajampeta MP P. Mithun Reddy recently visited the constituency and promised that drinking water would be provided from the Handri-Neeva project, apart from other development projects worth several crores of rupees. The YSRCP drubbed the TDP in the MPTC, ZPTC and panchayat elections in the constituency. Riding over the success, the YSRCP cadres are confident of a win by a big margin in Kuppam.
Political pundits say that the TDP cadres spent two and a half years in despair in the absence of any ‘guardian angel’. A general observation is that even as the TDP vote bank still remains solid in Kuppam, there is a vacuum in the local leadership, which was seen as the prime reason of the TDP’s debacle in the MPTC, ZPTC and panchayat elections. The Kupam municipal poll result will depend on how the TDP cadre would respond to Mr. Naidu’s clarion call to win all the 25 municipal wards, they say.
Meanwhile, Chittoor Superintendent of Police S. Senthil Kumar, along with senior police officials from Chittoor and Palamaner, on Wednesday inspected the arrangements being made for the filling of nominations.
