The headline on the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh elections from a national perspective is the Federal Front, which is the dream of the current Chief Minister and strongman of Telengana, K Chandrasekhar Rao ( KCR), who sees this non-BJP, non-Congress coalition as the third force in Indian politics, with him moving from effectively being the Nizam of Hyderabad to a star on the national stage: king-maker if not king.
Having persuaded the Congress to bifurcate the old Andhra Pradesh in 2014 and carve out a new state of Telangana, he seized power by wiping out the Congress in election that followed in Telangana.
NDTV analysis shows that if you translate KCR’s December assembly victory into Lok Sabha seats, he would get 16 of 17 seats.
And only a swing of more than 7.5% away from his party, the TRS, would see it get less than 15 seats. That’s a huge and unlikely change given that the assembly results are less than six months old.
Jagan Reddy, the leader of YSRC and potentially the winner of the elections in Andhra which has 25 seats. Opinion polls show Jagan likely to win anything between 19-22 of them.
