Will Balaji bowl them over for Naidu?

CHANDRABABU Naidu couldn’t have chosen a better place than Tirupati to wind up an against-the-odds poll campaign. He needs Balaji’...

CHANDRABABU Naidu couldn’t have chosen a better place than Tirupati to wind up an against-the-odds poll campaign. He needs Balaji’s help more than ever before. Also, it was here that he learned his economics. Or did he?

For six years from 1972 from classroom number 216 of Sree Venkiteswara University’s Economics Department, Naidu worked for his MA and an unfinished Phd on, of all things, the peasant movement. Since then the farmers have moved away from him, particularly in the last couple of years of his reign as CM.

Of the B, S & P, he got only the sadak right. The villages of Rayalaseema have little bijli and even less of paani. And you can nitpick him on his sadak success too. An old Naidu pal admits the roads are okay in summer but once the rains come, the surface goes. And they are built and rebuilt more with machines than with men so roads don’t yield jobs either. Naidu’s food-for-work scheme like his pet Janmabhoomi rural uplift programme has similarly benefited middlemen more than the target groups. That’s a neat anti-incumbency factor for you.

Do Tirupati’s Congressmen have anything better to offer? Not even vocally. They seem to have sub-leased the development debate to the Left. And the local comrades are loving it. Outside the Congress candidate’s house at 7 am, while party workers look half-awake, three comrades are already in the candidate’s living room up and shining. A young comrade is at his articulate best with occasional help from an uncharacteristically reticent advocate comrade-in-arms.

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‘‘Tirupati is turning into a migrant destination thanks to the surrounding villages getting steadily impoverished. The farmer-turned-construction workers who build apartments for the rich and powerful themselves end up homeless. So the party takes over government land for the migrants to build their homes.’’

The party is expanding in other ways too. The CPI(M) has a union in the Balaji shrine itself that includes a priestly forehead or two wearing the Vaishnavite caste mark.

While the Marxists have taken no more than a gingerely step towards Balaji, the political class here as a whole have kept God away from politics. This saving grace is amply evident at the passage to a mosque near the Govindaraja Perumal temple. A middle-aged bearded man in a saffron dhoti, long hair tied up like a Sikh, sits at the narrow steps of the mosque. For over an year, day after day, he has appeared here from nowhere and sat out without speaking a word to anyone. He looks a bit Hindu, a bit Sikh and quite non-Muslim. Nobody is bothered.

This temple township is truly divine. There is space here for the faithful, the faithless, the vote-catcher, the vote-loser and the anonymous.