Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

When the success becomes a habit people turn fortunate. The initial taste of success typically should give a boost to confidence and start the process of planning transitional and prolonged success. The ability to develop habits that sustain success and continue to mould thought process to keep being successful, while changing to the needs of the environment is smart strategy. When political success comes in democracies it is with a great price, probably with money spent and favors owed. Albeit the value of the position is ignored there is a huge private and financial cost to achieving political success. The love for power and public recognition will make investments into promises and money, and most times into ignoring future requirements to success. It is typical to make enormous and unrealistic promises to people to win elections. These promises are made while spending fortunes on winning votes and passing political messages.

Political advertising, feasting constituents with food and liquor, sometimes paying money through middlemen specially in poor democracies, caste or race baiting, pandering to minorities, kissing babies and aligning with local leaders is all in the name of winning votes, while spending money and time in reaching out to people and communicating the party’s political message, while putting personal life into public.

In Andhra Pradesh Chandra Babu Naidu tasted success fairly at an young age, albeit with the coat tails of NTR, and whatever was the means Babu used to get to become the chief minister the first time, he was there for nine years and tasted a great degree of success with transforming himself into an IT promoter and an executive chief minister. Everyone looked at him as the man with a vision (vision 20/20) and was invincible. His ditching of NTR and his family were quickly forgotten with people looking at clean roads in parts of Hyderabad and hitech. Much publicity was given to the technology boom and the infrastructure. Babu using a laptop and being able to email was at the time a revolution for Indian politicians. His meeting with Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were given enormous publicity and brought him great admirers from Indians around the world. The man was successful in raising enormous amounts of loans to fund projects in the state, and travel widely to visit with global leaders and was considered one of the most promising leaders to potentially lead India. I am not sure there are popularity surveys that track people’s perception of a politician in India (as they do probably every week in the USA and keep historical tracking) but if they did Babu would be one of the highest rated politicians in India while he was in power. His management of the state was authoritative and to the public impressive. When you were anywhere close to being a technical person, or had someone in your family who was aspiring to be technical Babu was the man with the magic wand. While giving Chandra Babu star status for IT development, for some reason people forgot Hyderabad never (not even today) achieved the status of Bangalore and Madras in technology center status. It is true a lot of success came into force to the city, and Babu actively promoted the IT infrastructure, but never reached the heights of the other two big cities in South India. Considerable credit goes to Babu for the advancements in Hyderabad developing infrastructure and communications, and most of all the public relations campaign to put the city as one of the prime locations for technology outsourcing. For someone who did not follow the politics of AP at the time, Babu could do nothing wrong and would be automatically elected as long as he was in politics. He was under 50 and with almost 9 years in power was looked at as a long-term chief of the state, and likely candidate to win term after term.

Even before the day of elections Babu was favored to win. When he lost, that too with the degree of losses his party sustained people were surprised and some even did not believe that he can lose. His successful takeover of Telugu Desam party from NTR and a nice tenure as the Chief of the state came suddenly crashing and that was not expected. Since the time he became a leader of opposition Babu has not been a shadow of himself. Looks like he continues to behave like a CEO but doesn’t run the company anymore. He is retired and not successfully recognizing that he no longer has the power to tell people. Complains constantly and in every sentence he speaks he states that things are outrageous and everything is going wrong. Babu constantly blames, complains and tells the cameras that how bad things are after he was stripped of power, and wants to make sure he tells people everyday that the current government is looting the wealth of common people.

The point of losing elections was probably did not register yet with the old government. The current set of politicians who were sitting in the benches of power probably complained about the Babu government as much as the current oppositions does, but never resorted to tactics that are a constant mockery of the democratic system as Babu and his team does now. A couple of years after losing elections that they should have won with great majority, Babu and his team are not preparing for a successful return to power yet. With close to half the time in the current government’s term, learning to appeal to people with positive tactics to get voters to appreciate what can be delivered to people by them when they are able to win back the elections. The point of learning from being thrown out of power is how to learn to win back the elections. The opposition should start learning on what made them successful in the first place, and probably appreciate why they lost elections. Sampling the success of power is not enough to keep winning. These guys should think of why they lost and how to start behaving like people who can win again. They are simply griping 24/7 and have irritating TV presence and put people of off. Two years of being on the opposition bench and having a successful rule under their belts should make these guys to behave like grownups who think on return strategy, not like deranged children who constantly shout and yell to get attention. Yes, they will get attention but people will be like parents of a badly behaved child. They will simply teach the kid to behave or ground the kid. The opposition will also receive the same treatment.

Sampling success is not enough. The lessons of why you were successful in the first place, and learning why you failed is important to become successful again, and continue to be successful. There is no prescription for how to win the next election and return to power, but constant bickering and protesting everything is no way to return successfully to power.