Rayapati maintains measured distance

Hyderabad: Lok Sabha member Rayapati Sambasiva Rao’s services were not available for Telugu Desam Party when it needed them most. Though the party chief N Chandrababu Naidu welcomed him with open arms into the TDP when he began showing signs of ‘yellow fever’ after the Congress had fallen from grace ahead of 2014 general elections, he has suddenly withdrawn into a shell Naidu sent him to Lower House at Delhi, since Rayapati is basically of MP mettle. He was MP from Guntur for a long time representing Congress and when the Congress was on its death throes, the parliamentarian left he party and boarded the TDP bus from Narasaraopet to reach Lok Sabha.

At a time when the TDP needed its MPs’ support to fight a battle with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rayapati is nowhere seen. While his colleagues in Delhi were stalling the proceedings of Parliament, the Narasaraopet MP is ‘cooling his heels’ in Guntur. He has a valid reason though. He underwent knee surgery recently and is now moving around with the help of a walker.

Even though he is 74 now, till he did the vanishing trick recently, he was quite active. He campaigned against railway zone coming up at Visakhapatnam contending that the headquarters should be located either at Vijayawada or Guntur as he believes railway zone’s headquarters should be where the capital of the state is. It is a different matter altogether that the Centre is yet to announce a railway zone, forget about where its headquarters should be.

It is said about Rayapati that though he was in the Congress for a long time, his soul remained with the TDP. His detractors in Guntur district say that he, as Congress candidate for Lok Sabha seat always used get substantial number of TDP votes in assembly segments in his constituency. The reasoning they give is that in these segments, candidates seeking election to Assembly on Congress ticket used to lose.

As his constituency used to abound in voters of his caste, he has a good rapport with them, always being available to them and helping them out whenever they were in need. In fact, when he was Congress MP, his participation in a caste conference organised by TDP and attended by its chief Chandrababu Naidu raised quite a few eye brows in the past. Rayapati played a key role in getting former minister from Guntur district Dokka Manikya Varaprasad who was a senior member of the Congress Party into the TDP, thus helping it become stronger.

Rayapati’s name also smells of strong tobacco odour in Guntur. His Jaya Lakshmi Tobacco Ltd is quite popular in the district and abroad where he had clients for the tobacco he used to export. He is into infrastructure and textiles sectors too. He comes from an agriculture family in Ungutur near Amaravati, a second century BC town and where Buddhism flourished.

But his foray into infrastructure which used to promise a windfall had worked the other way around for him. Transstroy, owned by Rayapati, bagged Polavaram Project in 2016 but kept struggling to deliver works in time, forcing Chief Minister Naidu to seek a change of contractor in 2017. The government claimed that Transstroy had gone bankrupt and was not in a position to take up works. Rayapati had said that it had incurred huge losses due to cost escalation. The company had raised loans in thousands of crores of rupees and allegedly turned defaulter.

His dream of becoming the chairman of the TTD not materialising and the Transstory row creating a sort of misunderstanding between him and Naidu and finally banks breathing down on his neck have confined him to his house. A person close to Rayapati said, “He badly wanted to become TTD chairman but Chandrababu did not entertain him. He seems to believe that if he joins his MP colleagues and fights against Modi, the Centre may ask the banks to go after him for recovery of loans. Any way he has undergone knee surgery and is not coming out frequently”.

R Prithvi Raj