Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy hosted top party leaders at his Tadepalli office in Guntur on Wednesday, October 26. The gathering is the latest among the steps taken as part of his ‘Mission 175’ ahead of the 2024 Assembly elections. As the name suggests, Mission 175 is an ambitious plan to win all 175 Assembly constituencies in the state. On Wednesday, CM Jagan met with almost 70 party cadres from Tekkali constituency in Srikakulam district and named MLC Duvvada Srinivas as the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) candidate from Tekkali in the 2024 Assembly elections. Top party officials as well as other leaders, including sarpanches, Mandal Parishad and Zilla Parishad territorial constituencies attended the meeting. The Chief Minister's announcement is contrary to popular practice as it is unusual to announce candidates more than a year ahead of the election.
Tekkali constituency is perceived to be the stronghold of the Telugu Desam Party’s (TDP) Atchannaidu. However, the YSRCP had won the local elections in Tekkali in 2021 by a large margin. Earlier in September, Jagan Mohan Reddy had announced the candidature of MLC Krishna Raghava Jayendra Bharath in Kuppam, yet another TDP stronghold from where Chandra Babu Naidu has won the last seven elections since 1989. At a public gathering there, he said, “I will make him a minister if you will make him the MLA. He will show what real development means.”
‘Mission 175’ is the Chief Minister’s motto for the upcoming Assembly elections which he hopes to make a clean sweep for the YSRCP. He began the campaign by mobilising party cadres in the home turfs of the TDP. The choice of constituencies where CM Jagan has announced candidates so far seem to indicate that he has identified his party’s weak points ahead of the Assembly election to focus efforts there. The unusually early announcement of candidates by YSRCP also points to the possibility that the party will face the 2024 elections without the backing of alliances. Neither the TDP nor other opposition parties have begun announcing their candidates for the 2024 election. It is rumoured that this is due to potential alliances between the TDP and the BJP or Janasena or both.
Duvvada Srinivas, YSRCP’s Tekkali candidate for 2024, was elected an Member of Legislative Council (MLC) in 2021. This victory came to him at the end of a series of losses. In 2009, Srinivas contested the Assembly election from Tekkali, without success, as the candidate of Chiranjeevi’s Prajarajyam Party (PRP). After the party merged with the Congress in 2011, Srinivas joined the YSRCP and contested the 2014 Assembly elections, but lost yet again. In 2019, he contested the Lok Sabha elections from Srikakulam and lost to TDP’s Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu. Announcing his decision to allot the 2024 candidature to Srinivas over senior leaders like Killi Krupa Rani and Perada Tilak, Jagan Mohan Reddy urged party cadres to work together to secure Srinivas’s victory.
Krupa Rani had earlier served as the Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology in former Prime Minister Manmohan Sigh's Cabinet. In 2019, she joined the YSRCP. Perada Tilak, on the other hand, contested on the YSRCP ticket in 2019, only to be defeated by TDP politburo member Kinjarapu Atchannaidu by around 10,000 votes. His failure was then blamed on internal conflicts among party cadres. He was later appointed the Kalinga caste corporation chief when the Andhra government established 56 new corporations in place of the single Backward Classes Corporation in 2020.