The Telugu Desam Party (TDP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) registered a landslide victory in the Andhra Pradesh assembly elections, winning 164 seats in the 175-member house.
All three NDA partners in the state – the TDP, the Jana Sena Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – registered a tremendous strike rate. The TDP, led by former chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, contested 144 assembly seats as part of a seat-sharing pact with its allies and won 135 seats. The Jana Sena, led by Tollywood actor Pawan Kalyan, won all 21 assembly seats it contested, while the BJP, which was allocated 10 seats as part of the alliance, won eight seats.
The mammoth win virtually decimated chief minister Jagan Mohan Reddy’s Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP), which could manage only 11 seats – a far cry from the 151 seats it had won in the 2019 assembly elections.
Thus, the results were a reversal of the 2019 scenario, in which the TDP had won only 23 assembly seats. This time around, the YSRCP will not get even the leader of opposition status in the state assembly, as the party has fallen short of the 18 seats required to be granted that status.
Among the prominent winners were Naidu, who won the Kuppam assembly seat in Chittoor district with a margin of 48,184 votes, his son Nara Lokesh (TDP) from Mangalagiri constituency, Kalyan (Jana Sena) from Pithapuram constituency, senior TDP leader Gorantla Buchaiah Chowdary (TDP) from Rajahmundry (rural) assembly constituency, former Union minister Y S Chowdary alias Sujana Chowdary (BJP) from Vijayawada (west), former state assembly speaker Nadendla Manohar (Jana Sena) from Tenali and former MP K Raghu Ramakrishna Raju (TDP) from Undi.
While Jagan Mohan Reddy won the Pulivendula assembly seat for a third consecutive term with a margin of over 65,000 votes, many of his cabinet colleagues, including Botsa Satyanarayana, Dharmana Prasada Rao, Ambati Rambabu, actress-turned-minister RK Roja, and Gudivada Amarnath, among others lost from their seats.
