The Telugu Desam Party is determined to wrest Narasaraopet - where polling was postponed from September 5 to October 3 - from the Congress this time and retain the seven assembly segments in it. Chief Minister and TDP supremo Chandrababu Naidu has sent about 10 ministers and 30 MLAs to the constituency to campaign for party general secretary Laljan Basha. Humbled by the Congress twice in the Guntur Lok Sabha constituency, Basha entered the fray quite reluctantly this time.Clearly, the TDP is batting on the back foot here. Polling was postponed following a devastating blast in the house of Dr K Siva Prasad Rao, state minister for panchayati raj, at Narasaraopet town on the night of August 28 in which four people were killed. The tardy investigations by the state CID since then has given a handle to the Congress which has accused the TDP of trying to shield the minister.To make matters worse for the TDP, Lok Satta, a voluntary organisation founded by a former IAS officer, has made a critical referenceto ``abuse of power (and) slow and biased investigations.''The Congress too has launched a no-holds-barred campaign. Its candidate, N Janaradhana Reddy, is a former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and was shifted from Baptla to this constituency. Earlier, this was the constituency of another Chief Minister, Brahmanand Reddy, who later became a Union Minister.In the February 1998 Lok Sabha elections, former APCC Chief K Rosayya had trounced K Saidayya of the TDP here by a margin of 47,000 votes.This time, the TDP has the support of the BJP, with which it had entered into a poll pact for both the Lok Sabha and assembly elections in the state.
