2.2 percent of gross state domestic product (GSDP) in the mid-1970s, this figure had
risen to 6.3 percent by the mid-1980s.
11
The significance of this history is that it essentially structured the “rules of the
game” in AP politics that Naidu inherited when he deposed NTR in 1995 (largely over an
intra-family and intra-party dispute over the patriarch’s love life). NTR so profoundly
reshaped the electoral arena that the entire span of his dozen years in AP politics has been
characterized as the “NTR regime,” even though a Congress Party government returned
to power from 1989 to 1994.
12
While it was precisely the new pattern of largesse that
plunged the state into fiscal crisis in the mid-1990s, the state’s voters—the middle classes
no less than the poor—had come to take consumption subsidies for granted by then.
Weaning them off would be a serious political challenge for Naidu, especially since the
Congress Party continued to try to exploit the electorate’s habituation for its own
advantage. What is more, the other prong of NTR’s original attack on Congress—
indignation at central interference in state affairs—also provided a weapon that Congress
could effectively turn back on the TDP under Naidu, simply by substituting the World
Bank for the Center as the nefarious external actor entwining its tentacles in the state’s
governance. Thus, Naidu faced formidable political constraints in implementing a
program of major fiscal and economic reform, which were largely the making of his own
party under earlier leadership.
The 1999 State Assembly election marked the first time Naidu stood as the TDP’s
leader and chief ministerial candidate. The last time Naidu had faced the voters—in
1994, prior to his induction into NTR’s cabinet as finance minister—he had stumped as
aggressively as any other TDP candidate for policies such as a reinstatement of the “Rs. 2
per kilo” price ceiling on rice and prohibition on alcohol. In an important respect, then,
1999 provided an opportunity to assess the extent to which Naidu truly had changed his
colors during the intervening years of fiscal crisis and World Bank courtship. Much of
the international media coverage of the election captured only one side of the Naidu
9
Convention