Photo craze stumps Praja Rajyam

BY J.R.PRASAD
Hyderabad,
A photo craze seems to be spreading among Assembly ticket aspirants of Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam. Instead of gathering a horde of followers and hangers-on to impress the decision makers, Praja Rajyam ticket aspirants are submitting "photographic evidence" of their public service record.

Whenever an aspirant comes to the Praja Rajyam headquarters he brings a bagful of albums with photographs showing him in action at health camps, blood donation camps and other public fora. There will inevitably be many photos of the aspirant happily feeding the poor. And most of the albums carry quotes from the speeches of Mother Teresa or A.P.J. Abdul Kalam or an adage like "service to humanity is service to God." This is meant to impress Chiranjeevi.

It is rumoured that some have even presented doctored photographs of their standing with Mr Kalam to get good marks. And others have "unwittingly" pasted pictures of Chiranjeevi in their albums too. Praja Rajyam sources say that ticket aspirants are spending thousands of rupees to create these swanky albums.

For instance, Ms Rayala Lakshmi Sudhakar, a ZPTC member from Piler in Chittoor district, who joined Praja Rajyam from the Telugu Desam, brought an album with dozens of photos of her in various "social service situations". And stuck on the last page was a still from a Chiranjeevi film.

Even the former IAS officer, Mr T. Chandrasekhar, who joined Praja Rajyam two weeks ago, presented a biodata with colourful photos. The photo craze seems to have got on the nerves of the Praja Rajyam leaders. The other day, the party spokesperson, Mr P. Mitra, chided a leader from Visakhapatnam who came with a big album. He also asked party office staff not to entertain such people.

In a bid to discourage these tendencies, the party leadership has now introduced plain applications for aspirants. But that has not ended the flow of photos. "We have two lorry loads of such albums now," said Mr Mitra. "We are keeping them in boxes." Till now, as many as 1,87,000 aspirants have applied for Assembly tickets from Praja Rajyam. Even if half of them have presented albums, they would make quite a pile.