Uncovered: Jaganmohan Reddy’s Secret Formula For Electoral Success

In September 2009, YS Rajashekhara Reddy, Chief Minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh, was killed in a tragic helicopter accident just months after he won a second term, and had vitally helped return 33 Congress members to the Lok Sabha.

Following that tragedy, his son Jaganmohan Reddy split from the Congress, suffered endless harassment from his former party over corruption charges, started his own party, the YSRCP (Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party), weathered a fractious bifurcation of the state in 2014, successfully took on N Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP), won a series of elections, became Chief Minister of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh in 2019, and, in the process, eradicated both the Congress, and actor Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam Party, from his state.

How did he do it? The simple answer is that, even though it may not seem that way prima facie, he did it on the back of the Christian vote.

This may seem incongruous to most readers, since, according to the 2011 census, only one solitary per cent of bifurcated Andhra’s population are Christians.

In that case, how on earth can such a small component contribute so greatly to Reddy’s electoral fortunes?

Well, the truth is that the actual number of Christians in Andhra Pradesh has been serially undercounted by orders of magnitude for decades. Rather than being just one per cent, they actually constitute anywhere between a fifth and a quarter of the state’s total population.

It’s an open secret which people talk about, but one which none are willing to address.

Raghu Ramakrishna Raju, the YSRCP MP for Narsapuram constituency, and a vocal critic of his party boss, Jaganmohan Reddy, had candidly stated on television in 2020 that Christians constituted around a quarter of the state’s population.

He calculated that there is at least one large church for every 18 villages in Andhra Pradesh, and pegged his Christian population range as between a base case of 12 per cent, and a more probable figure of 25 per cent.

But the clinching proof comes from a study conducted under the aegis of Dr J K Bajaj for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in 2016, in which, census data from 1911 to 2011 was used.

It made some startling observations.

The study showed that while the Christian population in bifurcated Andhra Pradesh rose consistently between 1911 and 1971, it has, in fact, shown a consistent decline since then, in both absolute and relative terms.

This data set has been developed upon by Swarajya, by integrating it with the data of the past three provincial elections in Andhra Pradesh, along with other components of the 2011 census.

Note how both the curves in the chart above reverse their trends and start declining post-1971. Such a situation can arise only if there is a mass exodus of one section of the population.

Instead, what we see is that, very curiously, the figures of the Scheduled Caste population in the state have risen in step with the decline in the Christian population.

Note how closely the two curves follow one another in the chart above. In fact, they match one another so closely that the rise in the Christian population between 1961 and 1971 is reflected in a near-equal decline in the Dalit population in that period.

This is direct evidence of persistent, successful conversion of the Scheduled Castes by evangelists to Christianity. The full data from 1911 to 2011 is presented in a table below.

This is further proof of interchange of identity within one community.

Obviously, a collective call was taken sometime in the 1970s that it made more sense to identify as Dalits rather than as Christians because they could then avail of the many benefits, including welfare schemes and job reservations, which became increasingly available to that section of society from that time on.

Equally interesting is the projection of growth rates in the Christian population from 1971 onwards by discounting the subsequent, artificial, forced decline:

The red curve in the chart above indicates that the Christian population in bifurcated Andhra Pradesh would have crossed 30 Lakhs by 2011, rather than the 6.8 Lakhs which was reported in the 2011 census.

It is the same with the blue percentage curve, which would have risen from around 5 per cent in 1971 to around 8 per cent in 2011.

The best example of how this veiling of faith happened in Andhra Pradesh is Guntur district, which had the largest number of Christians. In 1971, Christians accounted for 15 per cent of the district’s population, while Dalits were under 5 per cent.

And yet, over the succeeding half century, note how symmetrically the Christian population fell to under 2 per cent, while the Dalit population rose to 20 per cent.

Combined, Guntur has a Dalit-plus-Christian population of 21.4 per cent as per the last census. Again, that is very close to the YSRCP MP’s claim of 25 per cent.

Also, readers must bear in mind that this exercise covers only the Dalit community, and does not extend to others who too have succumbed to organised religious conversions.

So, this is the secret of Jaganmohan Reddy’s electoral success — a solid vote bloc of at least a fifth of the population, who are Christians but identify as Scheduled Castes.

Onto this, if we add the Muslim vote which Chandrababu Naidu lost to the YSRCP when his TDP allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, and the tribal vote, we see that Jaganmohan Reddy’s electoral victories clearly mirror demographics.

Here is the proof.

First, a map of the Scheduled caste population of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh by district. Note the heavy concentrations in the coastal belt, and in interior Rayalaseema.

That is a solid vote base of 30-40 per cent in most constituencies, and enough to secure a mandate with, especially in a state like Andhra Pradesh where margins are traditionally narrow, and the winner’s vote share is often around only 40 per cent.

In 2004, YS Rajashekhara Reddy and the Congress won 185 of 294 seats with just 39 per cent of the popular vote in undivided Andhra Pradesh. In 2009, they won 106 of 175 seats in Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra (now bifurcated Andhra Pradesh) with the same vote share.

No wonder, then, that Jaganmohan Reddy managed to replace the Congress in 2014 so smoothly, and improve his position further in 2019. Voting patterns stayed roughly the same; only the label changed.

In 2014, the YSRCP won ‘only’ 13 of 29 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes. But that was because some of the old Chiranjeevi-Praja Rajyam vote shifted to the TDP in the flux.

Even then, the YSRCP’s losing margin in the balance 16 seats were fairly slim, and in 2019, they won 27 of 29.

In today’s political environment, this sort of identity politics plus welfarism is a winning combination.

It means that it will be difficult for the TDP to defeat Jaganmohan Reddy in both the general and assembly elections scheduled for next year, unless it allies with a party like the BJP, to attract that vital 5-10 per cent of the YSRCP’s electoral kitty which is not part of the its core identity vote base.

This is the silent churn which has been taking place in Andhra Pradesh for a century.

Now, nobody cares what faith Jaganmohan Reddy professes, but they should care about the surreptitious, eminently-organised manner in which a fifth of the population in Andhra Pradesh avail of schemes and reservation benefits which they are not actually entitled to.

Question is: who will bell the cat?