Newsmaker: Nara Lokesh, another son rises higher

The day after Nara Lokesh was sworn in as a minister in his father’s Cabinet, local media used the phrase ‘Son-rise Andhra Pradesh’ to state the obvious fact. 

The media simply replaced the letter ‘U’ by ‘O’ in ‘Sunrise Andhra Pradesh’, a branding campaign widely run by the Chandrababu Naidu government for the truncated state in the past couple of years. While Lokesh was initiated into party activities much ahead of the 2014 elections, his inevitable role in the AP government came almost three years after Naidu came to power. 

Lokesh was born in 1983, right after his grandfather and legendary Telugu movie actor N T Rama Rao (NTR) had formed the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and just before he won the state assembly election, establishing a political alternative to the Congress party. Naidu took over the reins of party and government in 1995 from his father-in-law, in a family coup, backed by Rao’s own sons and daughters. 

Despite his unquestionable authority over the TDP, whether in power or out of power in the past 27 years, Naidu took care to ensure a clear path of ascension for his son, as the sole political successor. 

With entrepreneurship running in the family blood, Lokesh had taken a role as vice-president of the Naidu-promoted Heritage Foods in 2006, while doing an MBA at Stanford Graduate School in the US. Later, he became executive director; his mother, Nara Bhuvaneshwari, remained at the helm as managing director. In 2007, Lokesh married his maternal cousin, Brahmani, daughter of NTR’s eldest son and actor, Nandamuri Balakrishna. As Nara Brahmani, herself an MBA from Stanford, joined Heritage Foods to assist her mother-in-law in the business, Lokesh eased himself of those responsibilities to spend more time looking after party affairs under his father’s guidance.  

Lokesh was given credit for the idea of a direct cash transfer scheme in place of conventional subsidies for the first time in Indian politics. It was made part of the TDP’s manifesto for the 2009 election. While Naidu, who turns 70 by the time his party readies to fight the next electoral battle in 2019, has scripted his son’s career in politics, Lokesh might still have to earn his way through the final mission. He might have to change some of his ways to be able to win the confidence of leaders and the cadres — he has to become an interface between his father and those who find difficulty in reaching out to Naidu, say insiders. Lokesh meets party leaders on prior appointment, even while he has been the TDP general secretary since 2015. 

He has also been subjected to comparisons with the sibling ‘son-rise state’, Telangana, where chief minister Chandrasekhara Rao and his son and minister K T Rama Rao are somewhat ahead in this endeavour. Interestingly, Naidu himself has given scope for such a comparison by allocating to his son the portfolios of information technology and panchayati raj, exactly KCR’s decision on inducting KTR on forming the government in 2014.