Uddhav Thackeray’s story is similar to what megastar NT Rama Rao faced in 1995. NTR went down badly and even died as a disillusioned leader in January 1996, allegedly for want of good medical care.
Split in a family-run party happens, and it happens all the time. Mulayam Singh Yadav-Akhilesh Yadav, Parkash Singh Badal, Lalu Prasad, M Karunanidhi [now dead] and several other regional parties faced rebellion and coup attempts but they managed to quell it.
The story of NTR’s downfall is gripping. Here is a quick recap:
On August 26, 1995, nine months into his third term as chief minister of Andhra, his son-in-law and trusted lieutenant Chandrababu Naidu rebelled against him. Naidu defended his coup, saying he had been forced to act against his father-in-law because of NTR’s second wife Lakshmi Parvathi’s growing influence in party affairs and the state government. Lakshmi Parvathi was NTR’s biographer, and he had married her in 1993, much against his family’s wishes.
On that August day, Hyderabad saw the 72-year-old actor running amok on the city’s streets with a metaphoric dagger in his back to demonstrate that he had been betrayed and backstabbed. Suddenly, NTR was a nobody; his fall as dramatic as his spectacular rise. Virtually all members of his family and most of the Telugu Desam Party’s (TDP) 200 legislators deserted the chief minister. Life had, ironically, panned out exactly as NTR would often say, “What is destined to happen will happen. Victory and defeat are like light and darkness.”
Rao, who subsequently fell out with Naidu, claims that from the beginning, Naidu had wanted to become the chief minister and TDP president by ousting NTR to substantiate his claim. Rao has quoted K. Rosaiah, a senior Congress leader who later served as the Governor of Tamil Nadu, as saying that Naidu nursed a grudge against his father-in-law from the time NTR had launched the Telugu Desam Party in 1982. Rosaiah claims that Naidu had approached Indira Gandhi and told her that he wanted to contest against NTR “but she said she was not in favour of any such thing and asked the party not to encourage him to do so,” Rao has quoted Rosaiah as saying in the book.
Rao also gave a detailed account of what happened on August 26, 1995:
“On that day when I landed at the Begumpet airport, about 40 TDP MLAs surrounded me, asking me to come to the Viceroy Hotel. But I went home only to find Chandrababu Naidu, Harikrishna and Balakrishna sitting there and waiting for me. […] Chandrababu took me aside and told me that he will take over as the chief minister and party president. He told me that I will be made the deputy chief minister and Harikrishna will be appointed as general secretary of the party.”
When Rao came out of the room, Harikrishna and others asked him what he and Naidu had discussed. “I told them everything. Harikrishna was unhappy and demanded that he should be made a minister. I told him that he can become the deputy chief minister and I was not interested in joining the cabinet.”
Rao says two of NTR’s sons sided with Naidu and two sons and a daughter (Rao’s wife Purandeswari) were with NTR. He also admits that despite his wife’s pleas not to join Naidu, he had gone to the Viceroy Hotel (the centre of the revolt). “I committed an unforgivable sin,” Rao says in the book. Rao had returned to the NTR camp a fortnight later and stayed with his father-in-law till the actor’s death.
n his words: “I never thought even in my dreams that I will revolt against NTR. For me, NTR was not just a father-in-law, but a god whom I worshipped. But he was facing problems, having come under the influence of the ‘evil force’, and hence we were left with no other option to save the TDP. […] We tried all means to check her (Lakshmi Parvathi’s) influence and save the party but failed. Then, left with no option, we had to effect a leadership change and form the government (in 1995) in a democratic manner with the support of more than 200 MLAs.”
