Andhra polls: For Naidu's daughter-in-law Bramhani, it won't be a cakewalk

The mantle has fallen on 35-year-old Bramhani Nara not by choice but by force to lead the TDP, the principal Opposition party in Andhra Pradesh, in the absence of its leader and former chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu – who is her father-in-law. Amid speculation that even her husband Nara Lokesh, Naidu’s son, may be arrested for alleged misuse of funds in the Andhra Pradesh Fibrenet Project, Bramhani, backed by her mother-in-law Bhuvaneswari, has taken to defending Naidu. With Naidu’s arrest on September 10 in an alleged Rs 350 crore scam, his bus yatra, a campaign against the YS Jaganmohan Reddy government, has been suspended. Similarly, Lokesh has also dropped his Yuvagalam, a marathon 4,000 km padayatra, and gone to Delhi to meet lawyers defending Naidu in the Supreme Court and to mobilise support from national leaders. Bramhani, who is the daughter of actor Nandamuri Balakrishna (the son of party founder NT Ramarao), heads Heritage Foods, a milk and dairy products entity floated by the Nara family. Both have left their corporate world and got into public life for the first time since Naidu’s arrest. Bhuvaneswari is vice-chairperson-cum-managing director while Bramhani is executive director in Heritage Foods.

Candle march

Bramhani led a candlelight march to the Rajahmundry Central Prison where Naidu is kept. She has called for a “Motha Mogiddam -- making noise for five minutes -- as a symbolic protest. The TDP rank and file have invested a lot of hope in Bramhani to fill the void caused by Naidu’s arrest hardly six months before the assembly elections. This has unfolded a parallel between the ladies of the Nara family and those from the YS family -- Vijayalakshmi or Vijayamma, mother, and Sharmila Reddy, sister, of chief minister Jaganmohan Reddy. They ran Reddy’s party when he was in jail for 16 months in 2012. After Jagan’s arrest for money laundering and for holding assets disproportionate to known sources of income, Sharmila, accompanied by Vijayamma, came out of family life for the first time to campaign for the victory of the YSR Congress in 15 out of 18 assembly seats and one Lok Sabha seat in the by-elections in 2012 in the absence of Jagan Reddy.

Sharmila undertook a 3,000-km walkathon and filled the leadership vacuum in the YSR Congress. Later, she also undertook a 11-day bus yatra before the 2019 elections with a `Bye-Bye Babu’ timer clock against the TDP government.

Varying styles

A few similarities apart, the women from the two rival political families are vastly different in their public persona, leadership style and the art of public speaking. Bramhani, with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University and a Masters in business management from Stanford University is quite soft and alien to the rugged public life unlike Sharmila, who is seen as a firebrand leader with roots in a rustic rural background of the Rayalaseema region. Bramhani has earned accolades for her fluent and flawless speeches in English at elite and corporate gatherings. But she has yet to test the waters by putting to test her communication skills in native idiom and diction with ordinary folks on ground. Bramhani and Bhuvaneswari are yet to hit the streets unlike Sharmila and Vijayamma. For Bramhnai, X (formerly Twitter) is the only medium so far to launch a tirade against Jagan’s rule, saying democracy is in danger. Analysts find some differences in the timing of the arrest of Jagan and Naidu. “Jagan had more than one and a half years to go to the polls in 2014. He made use of this time to build his party from scratches and encourage defections from the then-ruling Congress from jail. It’s not so in the case of Naidu who has hardly six months,” Hyderabad-based Raka Sudhakar told The Federal.

TDP’s future

Going by the experience in the local body elections where Opposition candidates were not even allowed to file for nominations by ruling party workers across the state, it appears to be a hard time for the TDP. The situation demands a strong leadership. Leading aggressive roadshows ahead of the elections apart, the TDP has vested itself with the critical task of selecting right candidates and having seat-sharing arrangements with the ally Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena party to its logical end. Naidu’s party has a track record of losing 50 assembly seats traditionally since 2004 and winning 30 seats with a slight margin of 5,000 votes. This speaks of the need for the selection of the right candidates and effective poll management. Besides, Naidu allegedly failed to promote a second-line leadership after he took over the party from his legendary father-in-law NTR.

With Jaganmohan Reddy cracking the whip on the TDP leadership, a leadership crisis stares Naidu’s beleaguered party. Things could become difficult for Bramhani and Bhuvaneswari if Naidu is not bailed out at the earliest, it is said. As K Nageswar of Osmania University says, both women are politically inexperienced to accomplish such a challenging task.