How Pawan Kalyan helped the BJP-TDP get past the finish line

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi filed his Lok Sabha nomination in Varanasi, part of his entourage were several politicians of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). One of them stood out – Pawan Kalyan of the fledgling Jana Sena Party (JSP), which was founded as recently as 2014.

Kalyan was the only leader from Andhra Pradesh, apart from veteran politician and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief N Chandrababu Naidu, to attend the much-hyped event. The results of the just concluded elections show it wasn’t for nothing that the budding politician had found his space at the NDA high table.

Kalyan’s JSP won both the Lok Sabha seats it contested. In the Assembly elections, held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, the JSP ended up as the second biggest party, with victories on all the 21 seats it contested and pushing the incumbent YSRCP to third position. The JSP fought the elections as part of an alliance with the TDP and BJP.

Kalyan’s impact was felt on two fronts in the elections – one, he worked as the glue that bound voters of the Kapu community, to which Kalyan belongs, to the TDP-BJP alliance; and second, he attracted scores of young voters to campaign rallies and possibly, polling booths.

In political circles, word is abuzz that Kalyan managed to bridge the gap between the TDP, traditionally known as a party of the politically powerful Kamma caste leaders, and the numerically strong Kapus, who form 18% of Andhra Pradesh’s population. By doing so, he may have changed the political landscape of AP for good since the political rivalry between the Kammas, who form just 6% of the state’s population, and Kapus dates back to the 1980s.

It started with a high-profile murder. Congress’s Kapu leader and MLA Vangaveeti Mohana