Should BJP ally with maverick Pawan Kalyan in Andhra Pradesh?

 The following article was written for MyInd Makers. Pasting it here for reference:

Ever since Modi won a resounding mandate in May 2019, many politicians from Andhra Pradesh were making a beeline to join the BJP! The first major jolt to TDP came when 4 out of their 6 MPs in Rajya Sabha decided to merge the TDP RS unit into the BJP. Slowly, many spokespersons of the TDP started to jump ship into the BJP. And finally on January 16th 2020, popular actor Pawan Kalyan led Jana Sena party and the BJP had announced an alliance to contest all future elections together.

I had written back then on the futility of such an alliance. The viciousness with which the BJP was attacked by many of these politicians pre-2019 was to be heard to be believed. In addition to this, the maverick nature of Pawan Kalyan is bound to create troubles for any alliance that he is a part of.  

The alliance wasn’t a smooth one right from the word go. Pawan Kalyan withdrew his candidates from the GHMC elections at the instance of BJP’s negotiations with him (despite him being part of an alliance) but did not campaign for the party. Pawan Kalyan openly supported the TRS MLC candidate, just 1 day before the elections in early 2021. Pawan Kalyan and the BJP had multiple rounds of discussions and deliberations and announcements regarding which party will put up a candidate for the bye-election of Tirupati Parliamentary constituency in mid-2021.

Amidst all these tensions, on March 14th, 2022, Pawan Kalyan made another significant announcement. He said that he will not allow the “anti-YSRCP” vote to be split in Andhra Pradesh. To achieve this goal, he said that he will take a decision on what alliances need to be made, at a later point of time. But one does not need to be a genius to understand what he meant – that he will now be allying with the TDP in the 2024 elections; and that it won’t matter to him if the BJP will come along with him or not.

For all the frenzy that Pawan Kalyan creates, amongst his fans, when he speaks or ventures out for a public meeting, his electoral record is woefully poor. He went alone in the 2019 elections and won about 17 lakh votes state-wide (~5% of the vote). Pawan Kalyan himself lost both the assembly constituencies he contested. Only 1 MLA won on Jana Sena ticket in the YSRCP wave that swept the state. Pawan Kalyan doesn’t have enough cadre to make any mark in local body elections too. The local body polls in 2021 were also very one-sided in nature but the performance of the alliance was very pathetic even then.

Pawan Kalyan doesn’t engage with the press and public on a regular basis. His thought process is opaque and is often driven by emotion rather than reasoning. He always sounds angry and incoherent in his speeches. No one knows what stand he will take on a particular issue; and if he takes a stand, no one knows how vociferously he will be about it. It took him about 2 years to distance himself from BJP and TDP back in 2014-2016 window. It took him about 6 months to come back to BJP in 2019. And it took him about a year to again distance himself from the BJP.

So, you may now be wondering why does the BJP continue to stick with him? BJP is at its lowest ebb in Andhra Pradesh. The anger people had on Modi and BJP showed up in the 2019 elections (Just 2 lakhs votes from the entire state). Just when you thought that the anger was subsiding and that people were trying to warm up to the BJP, came the decision to privatise the Vizag Steel Plant in 2021. This set off another long series of public resentment against the “arrogant” BJP. The BJP has nothing to lose further in AP. And hence any alliance with the BJP will naturally be welcomed by them. But, in my  opinion, the BJP is going to gain nothing by allying with a maverick like Pawan Kalyan. They might as well focus on building their party from scratch, like they are doing in Tamil Nadu for example.

Amit Shah has repeatedly declared that the party will never ally with the TDP. Any alliance with TDP will be a huge slap on the face of the cadre too. Even TDP cannot sell this alliance to the people of AP, after the vicious campaign they unleashed against BJP in the runup to 2019. So, a TDP-Jana Sena-BJP alliance is really out of the question for the 2024 elections. Pawan Kalyan has all but announced his intention to come out of the alliance with the BJP.

The BJP needs to spend time to understand the strong resentment the people of AP have against it and put in stronger efforts to gain their trust. The past two years have proved that allying with Pawan Kalyan isn’t the path to do it.