Renuka set to prove a point

[kallu mama]

Trust her to take on a challenge. Renuka Chowdhary has never flinched from a fight, not when she was a corporator in the NTR days, not when she was an MP in the early years of Naidu and not when she was a minister in the Union government. A decade ago, she went to Khammam LS, a coastal Andhra native in a Telangana district. When the TRS came up to question the credentials of coastal Andhra settles in Telangana districts, she floored them all with the riposte: “I’m a Telangana aadapaduchu. Don’t you dare call me an interloper.”

Characteristic of her, Renuka tends to land up wherever there is a point to prove. Her constituency of Khammam LS is one of the more difficult ones in the state. It’s got a curious chemistry of four equal factions, the Congress, TDP, the CPM and CPI. When three gang up against one, it gets dicey for the loner. Trust Renuka to be where there is a fight.

She’s fought the factions of Khammam twice earlier and won each time comfortably. In 2004, she was the one who pulled one over the TDP’s Nama Nageshwara Rao by tying up with the two communist parties. This time, they are all ganged up against her, but she is not fazed. Well-wishers advise her to use her proximity with 10 Janpath to seek a safer constituency. But Renuka has never run away from a fight.

This time, there is a further complication. Jalagam Venkat Rao, the custodian of the Jalagam Vengal Rao legacy, coveted the Khammam Assembly seat after his own, Sattupally, was reserved under delimitation. But Renuka stuck with her preferred choice for the seat, Younus Sultan, a last-time loser. The Jalagam faction, now expelled, decided to make things more difficult for Renuka by fielding Jalagam Hema Malini on a PRP ticket.

That’s a crowd out there in Khammam LS but the gregarious Renuka is best in a crowded situation. Amid the babble of competing voices, her tenor soprano rises the highest and she makes sure she is heard. What goes in her favour is the notorious tendency of the two communist parties, CPM and CPI, bicker between each other to expand their only bastions in the state. The upshot often is victory for the third party.

That was the strategy the wily Jalagam Vengal Rao used to employ to retain Khammam. Renuka understands the game, and her confidence carries over to the people in a way her stodgy male opponents cannot match. She unabashedly drive a poclain, push a vegetable cart in the market and do a jig in the lambada thandas. There is no better campaign natural than Renuka. That’s why they send her back each time.