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N Chandrababu Naidu

N Chandrababu Naidu is currently the chief minister (CM) of Andhra Pradesh and the National President of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). He was also the CM of undivided Andhra Pradesh from 1994 to 2004. The son-in law of former Andhra CM and TDP founder N T Rama Rao, Naidu was the leader of the Opposition in the Andhra Pradesh legislative Assembly from 2004 to 2014.
 
He entered politics as a student leader in the Congress and is said to have been close to Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency years. In 1978, he fought and won the Chandragiri Assembly constituency on a Congress ticket. However, he failed to get a re-election in 1983, when the TDP made a clean sweep in the state. Thereafter, he joined the TDP and married one of NTR's daughters. Naidu's rise in the TDP came when he successfully marshalled the TDP legislative party's MLAs before the President to avert an attempted coup by a faction of the party. Interestingly, Naidu himself led a coup to overthrow NTR later. In 1994, he became the CM of the erstwhile undivided state of Andhra Pradesh and remained so for the next decade. He is often credited with turning around Hyderabad and making it an information technology hub.
 
Chandrababu Naidu is fighting twin battles at present. The Election Commission has scheduled the Andhra Pradesh Assembly elections 2019 along with the Lok Sabha elections 2019. He will square off against Y S Jaganmohan Reddy's YSR Congress. Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and West Bengal CM Mamata Bannerjee have sided with him and appeared in a rally to pledge their support. The Indian National Congress is fighting all the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies in the state which is predicted to eat into the vote share of YSR Congress. In case the Lok Sabha elections 2019 throw up a hung Parliament, Naidu is surely going to be a big name to watch among those who can possibly rally a bipartisan alliance.

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