Every time Telugu Desam Party MP Naramalli Siva Prasad visits New Delhi, he grabs eyeballs and media space.
This MP is known to don different avatars in a bid to register his protest in Parliament.
Members of Parliament of both the ruling TDP and the YSR Congress on Thursday staged protests against the perceived injustices meted out to the state by the Centre not honouring the promises made in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act 2014.
But it was Siva who caught everyone’s eye – dressed as he was as a tantric, who had been ‘possessed’.
His ‘possessed’ self warned Prime Minister Narendra Modi to fulfil the promises made by him “in the presence of Lord Venkateswara and Goddess Kanaka Durga”.
This isn’t the first time the MP has donned a bizarre avatar to protest.
He shot to prominence in 2013-14 for the varied ways he protested against the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.
In one particularly memorable protest, he flogged himself outside Parliament to show his unhappiness over the bifurcation.
He then proceeded to don various avatars – Lord Krishna, Mahatma Gandhi, Narada, Santa Claus, a snake charmer, as Harikatha artist and several others – to protest the division of Andhra Pradesh.
During a Parliament session in 2014, dressed as Lord Krishna, who tried mediating between the Kauravas and Pandavas, he approached the then UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi asking her not to divide the state.
In another instance, he dressed as a widow at a anti-bifurcation protest held at Gandhi Circle in Tirupathi.
The MP from Chittoor is an actor-turned-politician, who joined TDP in 1995. He became the Information and Culture Minister in 1999. He was also elected as MP from Chittoor for two consecutive terms in 2009 and 2014.
Siva worked in couple of Telugu films as a character actor and villain.
People have already started pointing out that he has taken over the tag of ‘Drama Rao’ conferred to the late actor NTR.