BackJagan to resume Padayatra today after attack on him last month
A YSRCP functionary said that Reddy's 'Pada Yatra' will resume from Makkuva village in Vizianagaram district of AP
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Hyderabad: After the attack on him last month at the Vishakhatnam airport, YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) chief Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy will resume his ‘Praja Sankalpa Yatra’, or ‘Pada Yatra’(walkathon), from Monday in Andhra Pradesh. Reddy, who has already completed 3,000 km of his political journey across the state, is expected to walk another 400 kilomteres as part of his public outreach before the 2019 assembly and parliamentary elections, slated to be held around April-May.
A YSRCP functionary said that Reddy’s ‘Pada Yatra’ will resume from Makkuva village in Vizianagaram district of AP. The YSRCP chief is expected to walk another 400 kilometers till mid-January, he added. Since he started it on 6 November from Idupulapaya village (in AP’s YSR district), Reddy has covered 12 districts, 209 mandals, 1,724 villages, 48 municipalities and has walked 3,220 kilometers, informed the party functionary, who did not want to be quoted.
Reddy, through his ‘Pada Yatra’, is looking to win the 2019 assembly elections and come to power in AP by defeating the incumbent Telugu Desam Party (TDP) led by chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. It may be recalled that Reddy’s father (former AP chief minister), the late Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, also took up a similar political journey by foot and won the 2004 assembly elections in erstwhile state of AP.
The YSRCP chief’s long walk came to a halt when he was stabbed in the left arm by a man named J. Srinivas Rao in the Vishakhapatnam airport on 25 October. His party has alleged that the AP government and police tried to undermine the incident, by saying that the TDP-run government has been trying to establish that the incident was done by the YSRCP itself for publicity sake.
In the Vishakhapatnam police’s report to the 7th Additional Metropolitan magistrate on 26 October, it was stated that Srinivas is in fact a “staunch supporter" of Reddy, and strongly believes that if the latter comes to power, he “can take appropriate steps to sort out grievances of the poor". But it fails to mention as to why Srinivas would want to kill Reddy in that case. These discrepancies were raised by the YSRCP following the attack.
Political analyst Palwai Raghavendra Reddy said that post the attack, all the details regarding the injury, weapon, time etc. were out in the public and that it need not necessarily result in Reddy gaining sympathy. “In AP, caste divisions are more and will play a bigger role in electoral politics. The public will have an opinion on it. But even Naidu faced a much more dangerous attack on his life from Maoists in 2004, but it did not have an impact on the elections and he lost," he pointed out.
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