Naidu

Hyderabad, April 29: The Andhra Pradesh CPM will tie up with the Telugu Desam Party for the upcoming state bypolls although the CPI will stay with the Congress.

Today in Calcutta, the CPM politburo accepted the Andhra unit’s recommendation for a state-level alliance with the Desam after a decade.

Sources said the Desam’s role in the United National Progressive Alliance and the CPM’s growing distance from the Congress, in the state and at the Centre, prompted the move.

Both the CPM and the Desam were in the United Front in the late 1990s, before N. Chandrababu Naidu hitched his stars to the BJP-led NDA in 1998. He dumped the NDA after the May 2004 poll rout but continued to be an untouchable for the CPM for three years.

For the past one year, however, the Andhra CPM has been working together with the Desam on the streets, organising protests such as the one against price rise.

Of the 18 Assembly seats going to polls — along with four Lok Sabha constituencies — the CPM is likely to contest from Musheerabad in Hyderabad and Cheryala in Warangal. It will support the Desam in 12 and the CPI in four, besides backing the new ally in all the four Lok Sabha seats.

The CPI, however, will stay an ally of both the CPM and the Congress, and will not be joining hands with the Desam.

The two Left parties had fought the 2004 national elections with the Congress but the CPM and the Congress have drifted apart in the state since then.

Last week, state CPM secretary B.V. Raghavulu had said: “Whether there will be a seat adjustment with the Telugu Desam for the bypolls depends on whether they accept our economic agenda against the Congress and the BJP.”

Naidu, once a reforms icon, has for the past one year been championing the CPM’s “alternative economic agenda” and turning up at farmers’ meetings to make pro-poor speeches. He is now touring the state to campaign against the Congress with CPM support.

In Naidu’s absence from Hyderabad, former Desam home minister T. Devender Gowd played a key role in sealing the deal with the CPM.

The four Lok Sabha seats and 16 of the Assembly segments fell vacant when Telengana Rashtra Samiti lawmakers resigned en masse. The other two Assembly vacancies were caused by the death of the Desam MLA from Terlam and Congress leader P. Janardhan Reddy of Khairatabad.

In an election of convoluted alliances, the Congress and the Desam, too, have a deal: to field the dead leaders’ family members at these two seats.