Chiranjeevi: Party tab

Hyderabad, Oct. 30: Actor, politician and, now, “spymaster”.

A videotape featuring a purported speech by Chiranjeevi shows the Telugu star asking aides to keep tabs on new entrants to his party.

“Spy on them, track whom they meet and what they talk,” was the directive from the actor who floated his Praja Rajyam party in August.

The alleged speech — denied neither by the party nor any source — came in the wake of reports in the local media of the new outfit’s political plans the actor had not yet formally announced. Sources close to Chiranjeevi said he had been trying to figure out how such crucial information about his activities and policies were being leaked.

The reports also claimed that Andhra Pradesh police were tapping phones of Chiranjeevi’s close associates.

Party insiders said the “malicious reports” that Chiranjeevi was reviewing his stand on a separate Telengana state and plans of talks with Maoists had upset the leadership.

“A detailed study revealed that they were the handiwork of some persons closely associated with us,” said a Praja Rajyam leader.

Chiranjeevi’s opponents, however, said he had become paranoid and was not being able to handle people from different walks of life. “His inexperience has been exposed. Politics is not a cinema production,” said state Congress chief D. Srinivas.

In the secretly taped version of the actor’s speech —said to have been made at a high-level meeting on Tuesday with trusted lieutenants — Chiranjeevi blames veteran politicians who had switched loyalties from other parties for the leaks.

“I have no belief in the senior politicians who joined my party,” he is heard saying in the footage telecast by several channels.

“Even a confident worker of the party has been bribed and bought over by outsiders (other political outfits) with money,” he says on the spy camera.

Among those who have joined Chiranjeevi are veterans from the ruling Congress and the Telugu Desam, and some of them had expressed dissatisfaction at the treatment they got from Praja Rajyam spokespersons and officials at the party’s Jubilee Hills office.

Chiranjeevi asks his aides to keep tabs on senior politicians in every district and report back to the party headquarters if they find anything wrong. “ In a way you have to be spies or rather agents,” Chiranjeevi says in the video.