A day after Telugu Desam Party (TDP) president N Chandrababu Naidu met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP chief J P Nadda in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy arrived in the national Capital on Thursday night. This has sparked buzz that the southern state with 25 Lok Sabha seats is set to undergo a political reconfiguration.

Jagan is likely to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior BJP leaders on Friday. This comes days after the Andhra CM said he hopes no party returns to power at the Centre with an absolute majority as that will leave the state with no leverage. The signals emanating from Jagan’s meetings in Delhi will be closely tracked, with the Andhra CM’s Delhi sojourn likely to be among the top political stories of the day.

In context: The visit is being officially viewed as one where Jagan will discuss special category status for Andhra Pradesh, one of the long-pending demands of the state and something over which Naidu broke ties with the BJP in 2019. As Sreenivas Janyala explains, during his 2017 statewide yatra the YSRCP leader constantly targeted the TDP over its inability to get the Centre to concede the special status. This ultimately forced Naidu’s hands and he quit the NDA. It also created the momentum that propelled Jagan to power in 2019.

But now the Andhra CM finds himself in the same boat that his chief rival and predecessor found himself in five years ago. The TDP wants the BJP to join hands with it and Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party to take on Jagan. Earlier, Sreenivas and Liz Mathew reported that while some leaders in BJP and TDP remain opposed to a tie-up, the top leadership of both parties is keen on an alliance.

For the BJP, expanding its footprint in the South, where it has lost two big states in two years, remains the larger goal. With the YSRCP not showing any signs of coming on board the NDA, one calculation in the party is that it can win a few Lok Sabha seats in Andhra on its own as part of the tripartite alliance. Since last year, the BJP has been weighing its options as Jagan, with whom its central leadership has cordial ties, is seen as the pre-eminent political force in the state. But in recent months there have been a few signs of anti-incumbency that have forced the Andhra CM to effect an organisational restructure. This has led to a few MPs quitting the YSRCP in protest. All this will likely shape the BJP’s final assessment.

For the past few days, there has also been speculation about a major shift in Uttar Pradesh politics. The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) led by Jayant Chaudhary is reported to be in talks with the BJP. There is a possibility of it ditching the Samajwadi Party (SP), its ally since 2019, and the INDIA alliance to join the NDA. Here is Asad Rehman with all the details.

There is just a matter of a few seats that remain to be sorted out, Asad reports. A deal, an RLD leader tells him, may be reached in a “day or two”. That means we may be looking at the second major exit from the INDIA alliance after Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) as early as Friday or over the weekend. That will raise questions about the future of the Opposition bloc that seems beleaguered, unable to close seat-sharing deals in states such as UP and Maharashtra. It also seems increasingly unlikely for the alliance’s constituents to reach an agreement in states such as Punjab and West Bengal.

While the Opposition totters along, the BJP is setting up its poll chessboard ahead of the big battle. The party has stepped up voter outreach and its National Council is likely to meet days after the PM returns from the UAE, which he is scheduled to visit from February 13-14.

The BJP, focussing its attacks only on the Congress, is also set to begin a nationwide campaign using the contents of the White Paper in which the Modi government has detailed how the Congress-led UPA allegedly mismanaged the economy. The government has scheduled a discussion on the document in the Lok Sabha on Friday. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is expected to reply to the debate for which four hours have been allocated. The Rajya Sabha will take up the discussion after clearing the legislative business listed for the day.

The BJP is also likely to keep up its attacks on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not from an Other Backward Class (OBC) community. The Maharashtra BJP’s OBC Morcha has announced it will hold demonstrations across the state on Friday in protest against Rahul’s remarks, reports PTI.