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Naidu’s son Lokesh to embark on 4,000 km long padayatra in AP
This was announced by Lokesh at a meeting of party workers at the TDP headquarters at Mangalagiri in Guntur district on Friday.
Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu’s son and party general secretary Nara Lokesh is all set to commence his marathon padayatra (foot march) across Andhra Pradesh from January 27.
This was announced by Lokesh at a meeting of party workers at the TDP headquarters at Mangalagiri in Guntur district on Friday.
He said he would embark on the padayatra starting from Kuppam, his father’s home constituency in Chittoor district and ending at Itchapuram in Srikakulam district on the borders of Odisha.
The TDP general secretary said his padayatra will cover a total distance of 4,000 km in a span of 400 days, indicating that he would walk, on an average, about 10 km a day.
He said he will walk for four days in Mangalagiri constituency from which he had unsuccessfully contested in 2019 assembly elections and in the remaining days, he willtry to cover all the constituencies in the state.
Lokesh called upon the party workers to nurture Mangalagiri constituency and “counter all kinds of weapons ruling YSR Congress Party president Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy would use to thwart his padayatra and defeat him”.
A TDP leader who refused to be quoted said the decision that Lokesh should take up a padayatra to galvanise the party cadre and revive the party’s fortunes in the run-up to 2024 assembly elections in the state had been taken during the party’s Mahanadu in May itself.
“But it took nearly six months to prepare the route map and Lokesh to be mentally and physically fit,” he said.
The TDP general secretary apparently wants to do a marathon padayatra, without any break, till he covers the entire state.
His father Chandrababu Naidu, too, had embarked on a similar padayatra from October 2,2012 to April 27, 2013. He covered a distance of over 2,800 km in a span of 208 days and it fetched him victory in the assembly elections in May 2014.
