Venkateswara Rao Daggubati

 

 

Purandeswari, the late N T Rama Rao’s daughter and Union minister of state for human resource development, regards her husband, Venkateswara Rao Daggubati, as one of her three key mentors. “My father and my mother Basavarama Tarakam were the other two,” she says.

Rao has been active in politics ever since his father-in-law formed the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in 1982. He has been a Cabinet minister, a member of both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and he is the current MLA from Parchoor constituency of Prakasam district. However, the limelight has tended to elude him. He is characteristically unassuming when requested to talk about his contribution to Purandeswari’s evolution as a politician.

“My influence on my wife’s entry into politics is negligible. Even I joined politics in spite of myself,” he says. Rao insists that he would not have joined politics at all had NTR’s other son-in-law, N. Chandrababu Naidu, who was then in the Congress and a minister in the state government, accepted the invitation to join the TDP. “If Naidu had any inkling that NTR would wrest power with a thumping show, he would have joined us then and there,” says Rao.

So he takes no credit for his spouse’s rise in the public sphere. He grins and says: “When she is my better half, I share half her eminence, don’t I?” But he refers to the moments of differences that he has with his wife: “Like any husband and wife we have our arguments but ideologically we are united.”

Rao recalls that his wife, who was seen by NTR as his real heir, initially resisted the idea of being an active political player. “Her priority at that point was her family and the children, who were growing up,” he says. “When NTR died a betrayed and bitter man, she lost complete interest in politics.” So when Purandeswari decided did decide to take the plunge, it was all very sudden and unexpected