Pawan Kalyan, Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and founder of the Jana Sena Party, and his wife Anna Konidala have announced their separation after more than 13 years of marriage. In a joint statement issued on Monday, 9 November, the couple described the split as mutual, reached with mutual respect, and said they would remain friends.

The statement said the two will continue to raise their children together. Their daughter is Polena Anjana Pawanova and their son is Mark Shankar Pawanovich. The couple did not give a reason for the separation and did not say anything about divorce proceedings or custody arrangements. The announcement left those questions open, and the statement did not indicate how the arrangements for the children would be formalised.

Anna Konidala is a Russian national and a former model and actor. The two met in 2011 during the filming of the Telugu film Teen Maar, and they married on 30 September 2013. Over the years she rarely appeared in public. She did, however, join Kalyan for the celebrations after his party's win in the 2024 Assembly election, a rare public appearance by her alongside him at a moment of political success.

Her public identity was also the subject of attention earlier this year. In July, she asked to be addressed as Anna Konidala rather than Lezhneva, a change that came as the couple's private life was already drawing public scrutiny.

Reports of trouble in the marriage first surfaced in July 2023. Speculation grew after she missed several family events, and the attention on her absences became a recurring theme in coverage of the couple over the following months. The Jana Sena Party denied the rumours at the time and shared a photograph of a puja in which the family appeared together, an effort to put the reports to rest that did not, as the present statement shows, settle the matter.

The separation marks the third marriage of Pawan Kalyan to end. His first marriage, to Nandini, ended in divorce in 2008, and his second, to the actor Renu Desai, also ended in divorce. Kalyan founded the Jana Sena Party in 2014 and became Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh in June 2024. The announcement therefore comes at a time when he holds a senior position in the state government, which places the personal news within the public life of Andhra Pradesh.

Source: siasat.com

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