Chandrababu Naidu crushing dissent as a dictator

The YSR Congress Party has strongly condemned Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s one-and-a-half years of what it called “grossly incompetent” governance, accusing him of resorting to dictatorial tactics — including illegal arrests and fabricated cases — to silence dissent.

Speaking at the party’s central office, YSRCP official spokesperson and former MP Gorantla Madhav, along with Penamaluru constituency coordinator Devabhaktuni Chakravarthi, expressed deep outrage over Naidu’s alleged disregard for the Constitution and democratic principles.

“Chandrababu is behaving like a dictator, using the police as pawns in his revenge politics to suppress voices questioning his failures,” Madhav said. “Arrests are being made preemptively, in violation of all legal norms, with cases filed only afterward. This is a direct assault on freedom of expression and press freedom. If not for the strong functioning of our judiciary, his schemes would have gone unchecked.”

The leaders cited the shocking arrest of NRI Bhaskar Reddy, who returned from London on November 2 for his father’s funeral. Despite being in mourning, Bhaskar was detained on November 6 at Kamineni Hospital, allegedly assaulted by police at the Gannavaram DSP office, and later booked under fabricated charges related to a decade-old social media post. “A grieving son was beaten so severely that he couldn’t walk, yet the police issued show-cause notices only after he detailed the abuse before a magistrate,” Chakravarthi recounted. “This reflects the TDP’s perverse practice of targeting YSRCP leaders and sympathizers to stifle even basic human empathy.”

The leaders also condemned the filing of cases against 27 YSRCP members and the Sakshi newspaper for demanding a transparent probe into the Kurnool bus accident, terming it an attack on public accountability. They alleged another instance of police misuse in Visakhapatnam, where student Kondareddy was falsely implicated in a drugs case, with CCTV footage revealing major discrepancies between the time of arrest and the FIR — details that coincided with the TDP’s social media narrative.

Madhav further criticized Naidu for failing to deliver on his grand promises, including the proposed 350 km/h bullet train for Rayalaseema, while he and his son Nara Lokesh “travel in luxury charter flights as state debt mounts.”

“To govern the people, Chandrababu must first understand the true essence of the Constitution — inspired by the French Revolution and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, which shaped Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s vision,” Madhav said. “Controlling thought is the ultimate form of cruelty; this is dictatorial thinking at its worst.”