Contestants on the edge over low voter turnout

Serilingampally: The candidates of three major parties who contested from Serilingampally constituency are busy determining their chances of winning the elections. The constituency has witnessed an intense campaigning in the last 15 days and all the three candidates – Arekapudi Gandhi of TRS, Venigalla Anand Prasad of TDP and Yoganand of BJP – have been confident on their victories from the constituency.  Each of them is busy getting poll numbers from their booth-level leaders in order to estimate their poll prospects.  Discussions are also being held with various community groups to know the poll trends. 

Serilingampally constituency has a total of 5, 73,433 voters, of which 3, 06,182 are male voters, 2, 67,125 female voters and 132 voters are others. The turnout in the constituency was 49.40 per cent: about 1.46 lakh male voters and 1.31 lakh female voters. In spite of the expectations of high voter turnout, no change was observed in the poll trends across all the constituencies in the city. Despite vigorous voter awareness campaigns by elections officials and political leaders, voter turnout was disappointingly low at 49.40 percent in the constituency.

TRS candidate Arekapudi Gandhi exuded his confidence of winning the seat again with a huge majority. He is banking on the developmental works he has done with the support of KCR and KTR. As the Kamma community constitute major chunk of voters in the constituency, he is confident of getting most of the community votes. Moreover, he was ahead of all other candidates in the campaign, as he was declared as TRS party candidate well before the notification and had already completed two rounds of campaign before others commenced their campaigns. 

Venigalla Anand Prasad, People Front candidate from TDP, is also giving a tough competition to other two candidates. Although his candidature was declared a bit late, he was successful in coordinating with the party workers and in conducting vigorous campaigns in the last 15 days. Many stalwarts like Chandrababu Naidu, Balakrishna, Vijaya Shanthi and Azharuddin also conducted road shows in the constituency. In the previous elections, Arekapudi Gandhi won from the constituency, but shifted loyalties to TRS later. Anand Prasad called people to teach Arekapudi Gandhi a lesson for betraying the party. 

BJP candidate G Yoganand too started his campaign late, but managed to intensify it in the last phase. He prepared a constituency-level manifesto and appealed to the people to give him an opportunity to serve them. Through his systematic campaigning, he has won the hearts of many and might give a tough competition to his opponents. Moreover, the constituency has strong party cadre and the candidate has expressed his confidence on his poll prospects. The suspense over who becomes the ‘sher’ of Serilingampally, however, is revealed only after counting on December 11.