The CEO gets booted

Everyone remembers Chandrababu Naidu as the CEO of Andhra Pradesh, the techno savy CM. According to one analysis, the two reasons he lost was “Telengana and Economics”:http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=46783.
bq. What else explains the anti-incumbency? No one can realistically claim that AP is worse off today than a decade ago. Even rural AP has progressed. Literacy rates have improved, demographic indicators have improved and so has rural infrastructure. It is wrong to suggest that Naidu was only about IT and bio-tech, only about Hyderabad and Cyberabad.
bq. Yes, there was a lot of hype and he was far too much of a CEO and not enough of a political leader. He was more committed to being at Davos than visiting a drought-stricken hamlet. He saw the Telangana issue only in terms of economic indicators and demand for water, not as a political and cultural alienation of a region that had a weak voice in successive TDP governments. He became, as I once titled my column on him, the Nizam Of Hyperabad!
bq. That, however, is not why he lost. He lost because he promised a ??Vision for 2020?? and just assumed the voter would remain invested in him in 2004, to be able to get there. Elections in democracies are about the here and now, Naidu spoke of only the distant and beyond.
If “this is a pre-game show”:http://www.madhoo.com/archives/003065.php#003065, then the NDA will be in serious trouble. The next Govt. formation might require some serious horse trading. Already the President is consulting “experts on a hung Parliament”:http://us.rediff.com/election/2004/may/11kalam.htm.

One thought on “The CEO gets booted

  1. Hard to believe
    I thought Andhra Pradesh was doing very well under the stewartship of N. Chandrababu Naidu. I was completely surprised to read the news about TDP’s trememndous loss in the elections to Congress and its allies. If you are equally surprised…

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