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state by hosting India's National Games in 2002 and the Afro-Asian Games in 2003. It was
alleged that P. Ahobala 'Billy' Rao, who ran the company in an arrangement with IMG, a
US-based international sports and events management agency, was acting in a benami role
for Naidu. In 2005, the YSR government stopped the deal and cancelled the allocation of a
400acre site. 40 It asked the CBI to investigate, but the agency did not do so, claiming a lack
of available personnel. The case was later reopened on the basis of two private petitions
and remains a subject of political controversy. 41
Looking back, it may seem surprising that there was not more opposition to what YSR
and Jagan were doing, and that Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) did not
pro-actively do more to build up a political campaign against them. One of the reasons may
be Naidu's poor political standing following his massive defeat in 2004. He had lost his
credibility and was widely criticized by farmers who had suffered four years of devastat-
ing droughts. He was probably also constrained by the fact that his regime had run its own
corrupt deals, so he did not want to provoke the government into ordering tit-for-tat police
inquiries. Also, politicians and officials did not think it was in their interest to rock the boat
and challenge such a determined minister as YSR, and most of the media played its accus-
tomed pliant role. YSR built a climate of euphoria among the people about welfare projects
that Naidu could not challenge. 'See, I brought you rain,' YSR said, when his election was
followed by good monsoon rains, building an image that helped him five years later in the
2009 election.
YSR's 15-20 per cent Corruption
The level of corruption under YSR was described in 2007 as 'an open secret' and 'beyond
the pale' even for India by David Hopper, then the US consul general for southern India.
'We thought Naidu was bad, but that was child's play compared with what is happening
now,' he wrote in a cable to the US State Department that was published by WikiLeaks in
September 2011. 42 'Typically, five to seven per cent is lost to corruption, but in Reddy's
irrigation programme that figure is more than 15 to 20 per cent,' said the cable. 'The sheer
size of Reddy's signature programmes, with literally billions of dollars at play every year,
leaves much room for “leakage” to Congress party officials and their allies.' The cable also
pointed out that the chief minister and his party took a bigger cut from promoters wanting
to put up multi-crore projects in the state.
YSR linked politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats by selling government-owned land
around key centres such as Hyderabad, the industrial and port city of Vizag, and the
temple town of Tirupati to raise money for infrastructure projects, notably a mega-irriga-
tion scheme called Jalayagnam. He gave government funds as 'mobilization advances' to
private sector contractors for the projects, many of which made little progress. 'Many of
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