Ahead of Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh and Lok Sabha polls, former CBI Joint Director VV Lakshmi Narayana on Friday, December 22, floated a new political party on the plank of fighting for special category status in the state. At an event in Vijayawada, he announced the launch of the Jai Bharat National Party (JBNP). He said that the main reason for high unemployment is the state not getting special category status.
Alleging that the YSRCP, the TDP, and the Jana Sena have all sidelined the issue of special category status, he said the JBNP will bring the issue to mainstream discussion. Lakshmi Narayana recalled that special category status to Andhra Pradesh was promised in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act 2014 and said all parties failed to achieve this despite making tall claims.
He said the state lost three opportunities to demand the Union government to accord special category status. The former IPS officer said his party will bring a change in the politics. "At a time when politics is considered as betraying people, Jai Bharat Party has been born to show that politics means bringing good governance," he said.
Lakshmi Narayana joined the Jana Sena party of actor-politician Pawan Kalyan just before the 2019 elections. He had unsuccessfully contested the Visakhapatnam Lok Sabha seat on the Jana Sena ticket. In 2020, he quit the Jana Sena citing Pawan Kalyan’s decision to return to films as the reason for his exit.
Lakshmi Narayana had taken voluntary retirement in 2018. He was then serving as the Additional Director General of Police (Planning and Coordination) in Maharashtra. While serving as the Joint Director of the CBI, he had investigated the disproportionate assets charges made against YSRCP President YS Jagan Mohan Reddy. He also investigated other high-profile cases such as the Obulapuram mining case in which the Ballari Reddy brothers were accused of indulging in illegal mining, the investigation of financial fraud by Byrraju Ramalingaraju of Satyam Computers and Emmar Projects cases. Over time, he developed the image of a ‘tough cop’, and ‘JD’ (the acronym for Joint Director) replaced his original initials ‘VV’ as a prefix in the public domain, although he retired from the Indian Police Service with the rank of IG.