Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for Vijayawada (West) constituency, Sujana Chowdary, defeated YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) candidate Shaik Asif in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly elections. Sujana was elected with 1,05,669 votes, securing a margin of 47,032 votes against Asif. In an attempt at social engineering, the YSRCP high command had shifted their incumbent Vijayawada (West) MLA Vellampalli Srinivas to Vijayawada (Central) constituency.
Sujana was the Union minister of state for Science, Technology under the NDA government between 2014 and 2018. After the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) lost the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh in 2019, Sujana, then a Rajya Sabha MP from TDP, quit the party and joined the BJP. He was also the Parliamentary leader for the yellow party at the time of quitting.
This is the first time Sujana Chowdary has contested in the Assembly elections.
In the current Assembly election, TDP contested from 144 seats, Jana Sena from 21, and BJP from 10 seats. TDP joined hands with the BJP after six years.
Several factors including anti-incumbency against the YSRCP in NTR district (named after TDP founder NT Rama Rao) worked in the TDP-BJP-JSP alliance’s favour. YSRCP’s unwillingness to develop Amaravati (carved out of Vijayawada, Guntur, Mangalagiri and Tenali) as Andhra Pradesh’s new capital, drew the ire of the district’s voters. All seven assembly segments of Tiruvuru, Vijayawada West, Vijayawada Central, Vijayawada East, Mylavaram, Nandigama and Jaggayapeta under the Vijayawada Lok Sabha seat were won by the alliance.
TDP has historically had a hold over the segments in Vijayawada that have witnessed large scale consolidation of Kammas (forward caste). Leaders like NTR, Chandrababu Naidu, and Devineni Nehru have held sway over the district. Coupled with that, the TDP joining hands with the Kapu leader Pawan Kalyan-led Jana Sena, NTR district bolstered its presence in all Assembly segments including Vijayawada (West).