Chendupatla Janga Reddy, one of the first two BJP MPs in the country, has passed away. He was 87 years old. Family sources said he died of old age on Saturday morning.
In the 1994 Lok Sabha elections, he won on the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet member P.V. Narasimha Rao in the Hanamkonda Lok Sabha seat in undivided Andhra Pradesh. Due to the defeat, P.V. Narasimha Rao did not get a place in the Rajiv cabinet at first. Janga Reddy, an activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), won the Jana Sangh and BJP ticket in the three-point assembly elections in undivided Andhra Pradesh in 1967-64.
After the death of Indira Gandhi, in the 1974 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress party got a huge majority in the air of national sympathy. For the first time in the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won only two seats. Hanamkonda of undivided Andhra Pradesh as well as the Lok Sabha seat of Mehsana in Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s district. BJP leader Amritlal Kalidas Patel, who won Mehsana this time, won six consecutive Lok Sabha votes from that constituency.
