![]() Eenadu sold 5 lakh copies a day, and dominated public opinion in Andhra Pradesh. Rao was widely credited with having helped NTR and the TDP into power. To swing the balance in his favour, NTR’s wife, Lakshmi Parvathi, had set up an appointment with Cherukuri Ramoji Rao, the owner-editor of Eenadu, the state’s largest-selling Telugu newspaper. He was in delicate health he had had to leave out the interior regions of the state entirely during campaigning, and restrict himself to main roads of Andhra. NTR was 71 years old, and could no longer campaign the way he used to a decade earlier, when practically all of Andhra Pradesh turned out to greet him on its roads. The state was in the midst of fresh elections, and forecasts from the first phase of polling were less than comforting for the TDP. On this day, however, he had been out of power for five years. The TDP was now indelibly part of the state’s political make-up, and NTR himself had been its first ever non-Congress chief minister. He had founded the Telugu Desam Party in opposition to the Congress, and reaped rich electoral rewards through the 1980s. Once a movie star, the hugely popular NTR had changed the very character of Andhra Pradesh politics over the previous decade. On a cold day in December 1994, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, universally known as NTR, woke, of long habit, at 3 am. How Ramoji Rao of Eenadu wrested control of power and politics in Andhra Pradesh
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