Late night meetings are part and parcel of the election season. On Thursday evening, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership began conversations with two regional parties that went on for long to firm up a possible alliance.

Former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who heads the Telugu Desam Party, and actor-turned politician Pawan Kalyan, who heads the Jana Sena, met Union home minister Amit Shah for talks on pre-poll tie-ups.

The TDP, which walked out of the BJP-led NDA in 2018 over the issue of granting special status to Andhra Pradesh, has been sending feelers to be reincluded in the coalition. Kalyan too has played a role in helping Naidu mend fences with the BJP.

With the BJP securing alliances in a bid to meet its target of winning over 400 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, the TDP-JS combine is well on its way to a formal induction into the NDA. The nitty-gritty of seat sharing for both the Lok Sabha and state elections is nearly over.

The new alliance will give the BJP room to gain a foothold in the southern state and help bag more seats in the general elections. The party has been working hard to emerge as an alternative in Andhra Pradesh but has little to show in terms of electoral performance. It has does not have a single legislator in the 175-member assembly, while its vote share in the previous assembly elections was less than 1%.

In July, the party appointed D Purandeswari as the state unit president with an eye on Naidu’s vote bank. Daughter of the late NT Rama Rao, the founder of TDP, Purandeswari is related to Naidu and is from the politically dominant Kamma community.

Sops

Social welfare schemes and sops for consumers have been integral to the BJP-led NDA governments’ policies in the last decade. With schemes such as Ujjwala Yojana for subsidised gas connections, PM Kisan Nidhi, PM Awas Yojna, the government created a new vote bank of beneficiaries or ‘labharthis’.

While the government takes credit for empowering the poor and the marginalised through schemes, there has been criticism from the opposition that spiraling costs of fuel have made it hard for the common man to pay for the refills of cooking gas cylinders.

To rule out any damage to its electoral foray, the government on Thursday announced a subsidy for cooking gas through a ₹12,000 crore bonanza to 102.7 million poor households by extending ₹300 subsidy on cooking gas refills for one more year up to 31 March 2025.

From 21 May 2022, the government has been providing budgetary support for a targeted subsidy of ₹200 per 14.2kg LPG cylinder for PMUY beneficiaries for up to 12 refills a year.