He asked them to work in perfect coordination to achieve this target, sinking differences with other leaders.
Amit Shah with BJP leaders in Telangana. (Supplied)
Eyeing not less than 10 Lok Sabha seats in Telangana in the ensuing Parliamentary elections, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has warned the state leaders against continuing their internecine quarrels which, he said, had hurt the party in the recent Assembly elections.
Shah, after he arrived in Hyderabad on Thursday, 28 December, was closeted with party leaders at a meeting at Kongarkalan on Hyderabad’s outskirts for a while.
He then drove to the Bhagyalakshmi Temple in Old City where he offered special prayers to the deity as is his wont every time he visits Telangana.
At his meeting with party functionaries, the BJP leader made no secret of his displeasure with the dismal performance of the party in the state in the Assembly elections even though the situation was conducive for it to put up a better show.
He said he had expected that the party would win at least 30 of the 119 seats in the Assembly, but the local leadership frittered away the golden opportunity.
He said he had a reason to believe that a lack of coordination among the leaders and internal politics had taken a heavy toll on the party’s performance.
He asked state unit leaders to work in perfect coordination, sinking differences with other leaders. He said does not want a repeat of the Assembly poll verdict in the Lok Sabha elections.
https://twitter.com/AmitShah/status/1740368779564200356
The Union minister is understood to have told the Telangana BJP leaders that all the four sitting MPs would be renominated from the seats they currently represent in Lok Sabha.
For the rest of the 13 Lok Sabha seats in the state, the party would be very careful in choosing the right candidates.
He reportedly told them that the party would take into consideration the survey reports for allotting tickets for the remaining 13 seats.
He added that unlike in the run-up to the Telangana Assembly elections, this time the party would announce the tickets well in advance so that there would be no uncertainty that could lead to the loss of valuable campaigning time.
Shah asked the Telangana BJP leaders to aim at winning at least 10 Lok Sabha seats. He pointed out that the BJP had set a target of 400 seats at the national level in the polls.
He predicted that in the next Assembly elections five years later, the BJP could win between 64 and 94 seats and form the government in Telangana.
He described the outcome of the recent Assembly poll verdict more as a BRS’ defeat than Congress’ victory. The state sipped from one family rule into another, he said.
When he said he would base candidates’ selection on survey reports, he probably was implying that he would take into consideration the intelligence that is gathered by the Association of Billion Minds (ABM) — the BJP’s in-house political consultancy and campaign strategy team that reports directly to him.
It is said that in the run-up to the Assembly elections in Telangana, the party deployed about 150 ABM workers to gauge the pulse of the people. The purpose was to know and report the response from people to the party’s initiatives.
But even this contingent could not rise to the occasion in advising the party leadership properly. This is reportedly on account of the lack of a strong party network in the state, which it usually uses for its work.
Though the Telangana BJP leadership was happy with its performance in the Assembly elections, Amit Shah was not, and he wanted them to pull up their socks and work hard to improve on the last Lok Sabha elections’ score of four seats.
Though the BJP had shown promise under Bandi Sanjay’s leadership when he was party state president, it cooled off after the party’s debacle in Karnataka. The Congress began rising even as BJP’s stock began plummeting very fast.
However, the BJP’s growth in Telangana has been steady since the 2018 Assembly elections. The party won only one seat — Goshamahal — back then. It was an ignominious defeat for the party as it lost the security deposit in 103 of the 115 seats it contested.
It later on won four Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections — Adilabad, Karimnagar, Nizamabad, and Secunderabad.
The momentum continued with the party picking up Assembly seats in the by-elections for Dubbak and Huzurabad, and significantly improving its tally in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections though it lost three byelections — Huzurnagar, Nagarjuna Sagar and Munugode.
The Telangana BJP then ended up with eight seats in the 30 November Assembly elections this year. The party considered it a great achievement and adopted a resolution at a state-level party leaders’ meeting in Kongarakalan that, apart from winning eight Assembly seats, the party had ended runners up in 19 Assembly segments, polled votes between 50,000 and 1 lakh in 24 segments, and polled up to 20,000 votes each in 75 constituencies.
The vote share, which was 6.9 percent in 2018, had doubled and stood at 14 percent this year, the party said.
The party also made a mention of the sensational victory that K Venkataramana Reddy scored over former chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao and incumbent Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy in Kommareddy.
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