JULY BLUES for TDP

DESARAJU SURYA
Hyderabad: The Telugu Desam Party may now have to treat July as an inauspicious month as far as its national politics are concerned.
Everybody knows that August is generally considered ominous for the Yellow brigade in Andhra Pradesh, going by the TDP's history. A small piece of history, coupled with the latest happenings, would drive one to infer that July certainly doesn't bode well for the party at the national level.
It was in July way back in 1993 that the TDP Parliamentary Party witnessed a major split with six out of 13 Lok Sabha members, led by the then Narsapur MP Bhupatiraju Vijaya Kumar Raju, defied the party to charter their own path. It was the no-confidence motion against the P V Narasimha Rao government and the TDP members were supposed to vote for it. However, following a request made by none other than P V himself, Bhupatiraju convinced five of his fellow party MPs to vote against the no-confidence motion. MPs K V R Choudary (Rajahmundry), Thota Subba Rao (Kakinada), K P Reddaiah Yadav (Machilipatnam), Indrakaren Reddy (Adilabad) and Ganga Reddy (Nizamabad) obliged and faced the axe from TDP.
History seemed to have repeated on Tuesday for the party when two out of its five MPs in Lok Sabha openly violated the party diktat and voted in support of the confidence motion moved by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
This has indeed come as a rude shock for the TDP at a time when its supremo is trying to cobble a coalition of non-Congress and non-BJP parties at the national level.
Now, what course will Naidu take is the question that's haunting the partymen.