Hard for TDP, as Harirama Jogaiah demands 11 Assembly seats for Jana Sena in West Godavari

AMARAVATHI: Seat-sharing between the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Jana Sena is likely to snowball into a major hitch between the two parties which have already declared that they will go to polls together.

Senior leader and former Minister Chegondi Harirama Jogaiah in an open letter on Wednesday demanded that Jana Sena be given maximum number of seats in East and West Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh.

As the Kapu vote was 90 per cent in West Godavari, Jogaiah, founder of Kapu Samkshema Sena, demanded that 11 Assembly seats and Narasapuram Lok Sabha seat be allotted to the Jana Sena in West Godavari district.

He put forth the list of 11 Assembly seats — Narasapuram, Bhimavaram, Tanuku, Tadepalligudem, Nidadavole, Ungutur, Eluru, Polavaram, Gopalapuram, Kovvuru, and Undi.

He asserted that without the support of the Jana Sena, the candidates of the TDP could not win even a single seat. With Kapus comprising 90 percent of voters in the district, the TDP had to allot the seats mentioned to ensure the victory in all the seats by the TDP-Jana Sena combine by defeating the YSR Congress. To achieve this goal, the TDP had no alternative but to allot maximum seats to the Jana Senate.

Since both parties decided to ensure proper vote transfer between the parties, the Jana Senate candidates should be fielded in maximum number of seats in East and West Godavari districts based on the population of Kapus.

Electors were already growing curious on how the seat-sharing would happen between the parties, said Jogaiah.

In fact, he had already demanded that the Jana Sena be allocated 55 seats out of the 175 in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly and five Lok Sabha seats out of the 25.

If the BJP joined the alliance, the TDP will have to cut the proverbial coat according to the cloth.

One speculation that is doing the rounds in social media is that the BJP had proposed a proportion on how to share the seats between the three parties. If the speculation were to be believed, the ratio suggested by the BJP was to share the seats on 4:2:1 basis. This boils down to 100 seats for the TDP, 50 to the Jana Sena and 25 to the BJP.

However, the TDP may not budge to yield so many seats to alliance partners. The TDP, at the most, may allot 25 seats to Jana Sena and much less to the BJP.

When it comes to Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is said to be proposing to the TDP to contest 13 seats, leave seven to it and five to Jana Sena.

However, the TDP may not settle for anything less than 20 Lok Sabha seats.

While the YSR Congress is grappling with dissent over denial of tickets to aspiring candidates and sitting legislators and MPs and exits due to refusal of tickets, the TDP will start facing the heat from within the party after the seat-sharing equation with Jana Sena and the BJp, if it partnered with the alliance, is finalised.

The TDP is likely to announce its candidates only in the last minute, and may force its alliance partners too to tread the same path.

By the time, discontent begins to brew within the TDP over ticket allocation, the YSR Congress would have been sorted with this dust settling down.

Andhra Pradesh is all set to witness an interesting battle.