Adilabad:
Marriages are often driven by the power of love. In Andhra Pradesh, some marriages are driven by the love for power.
A couple in the Adilabad district of the state headed straight from their marriage venue last Friday, not for their honeymoon, but to file nomination papers. Panchayat elections are scheduled in three phases in the last week of July.
In Andhra Pradesh, 50 per cent of the panchayat posts are reserved for women. Which means more than 10,000 sarpanch posts will go to women.
This happens by rotation. This time, the Devulawada gram panchayat in Adilabad was reserved for a scheduled caste woman. Political activist Asarilli Tirupati had hoped to win the seat, but since he could not contest, he did the next best thing. He married a woman who could.
So the newly-married couple, still wearing the wedding garlands they had exchanged, went to the local school premises where the new bride filed her nomination papers for the post of sarpanch.
Tirupati, the groom, candidly admitted, "I had been wanting to get married for the last three years. I also wanted to contest the sarpanch election. The seat was reserved for a woman. It was a good muhurat, so I got married to her and we filed nomination the same evening."
The bride, Durgam Samakka, is a political novice.
There have been at least three such weddings in the last week. Andhra Pradesh Congress chief Botsa Satyanarayana does not think this will lead to the husbands of the women who win such seats ruling by proxy. "No, no. It doesn't happen that way always. My wife is an MP. Everyday and everytime, how can I control? She is her own individual."
Reservation of seats for women has also led to there being no appropriate candidates in at least 25 of the 21,441 seats. This is because in Andhra Pradesh, apart from the 50 per cent quota for women, there is 60.55 reservation for Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribe candidates.
The reservation happens by rotation for different categories and in those 25 seats, no one could file a nomination because in the entire population under the gram panchayat, there was no one of the same caste or sex for whom the seat was reserved.