In his second leg of campaigning, which will begin at Achampet, KCR is expected to address some 30 public meetings till 9 November.
KCR at the Husnabad rally to kickstart the BRS campaign for the Telangana Assembly election. (X)
The BRS’s campaign for the ensuing Telangana Assembly election is expected to pick up again on Thursday, 26 October.
Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, fresh from the Dasara break, will resume addressing election rallies to put some energy back into the campaign in the run-up to the 30 November joust at the hustings.
The party’s ministers seem to have relaxed a bit with many of them having already received B-Forms from the party supremo. But KCR is keen that the tempo is sustained, and that it should gradually increase to a feverish pitch to capture the imagination of the voters.
He hit the ground running when he addressed his first election rally at Husnabad in Siddipet district, immediately after releasing the party’s manifesto at Telangana Bhavan on 15 October.
In his second leg of campaigning, which will begin with an election rally at Achampet, the Chief Minister KCR is expected to address at least 30 public meetings till 9 November, when he will file his nomination papers for Gajwel and Kamareddy seats.
He will also address a major public meeting at Kamareddy, which will mark the end of his second campaign phase.
Meanwhile, KCR’s son and BRS working president KT Rama Rao has asked all ministers and MLAs to ensure wide publicity for the manifesto and be ahead of the Congress in convincing the electorate that the party’s promises to the people are far better than the six guarantees that the Congress made on 17 September at a public meeting in Thukkuguda in Hyderabad.
At the state level, the party leaders are pulling up their socks to make the most of the time available to turbo-charge the campaign. KTR, also the IT minister, has set up war rooms in each constituency and in-charges for them to ensure that the campaign is carried out effectively in every segment.
The idea is to sort out any differences that the candidates and other leaders may have that might affect the pace of outreach.
The entire BRS machinery is being readied to roll on without any hiccups anywhere. The focus of the campaign is the party’s manifesto and explaining to the people how it is going to transform their lives.
The party wants the workers to ensure that the new promises made in the manifesto become the talk of the town as they have a feeling that the manifesto is yet to reach many voters.
The party workers have already been instructed to set up flexis and banners in villages and towns to provide the necessary optics for the car symbol, while organising athmeeya sammelans to get involved with the voters emotionally.
With reports pouring in that the Congress party’s stock is going up, the BRS is also understood to have decided to keep its flock together, giving little chance for poaching by the Congress.
The party leaders are trying to placate the raw nerves of the leaders who could not get party tickets, like in Sangareddy where Finance Minister T Harish Rao visited DCCB chairman YVS Patnam Manikyam and pacified him with a promise for a better future in the BRS.
Later, Harish Rao announced that Manikyam had consented to campaign for Chinta Prabhakar, the BRS nominee for Sangareddy.
Interestingly, the chief minister’s contest in Gajwel and Kamaraeddy may not be as smooth a ride as one had thought earlier.
In Gajwel, BJP Huzurabad MLA Eatala Rajender has thrown his hat in the ring to settle a score with his former boss for hounding him out of the Cabinet and the party. KCR, while throwing him out, had said that Rajender was up to something big against him.
Having fallen from grace, Rajender exacted sweet revenge against KCR by pulling off a sensational victory in a subsequent by-election to Huzurabad in November 2021. But his thirst for revenge does not seem to have abated. He wants to defeat KCR in his home turf in the upcoming Assembly election.
Though he may not be able to vanquish KCR, he may, at least, make the chief minister earn every vote cast in his favour.
As Rajender was with the BRS during its inception, he has good contacts with party functionaries. The disgruntled BRS elements in Gajwel are already throwing their lot behind him. This way, Rajender might cut into KCR’s votes rather than those of the Congress.
Political analysts believe that the reason KCR held a tête-à-tête with the constituency-level leaders recently, the first in nearly 10 years, was to ensure that no vote of BRS should go in favour of Rajender.
In Kamareddy, the X-factor that no one thought of has suddenly made its appearance. As many as 120 farmers have decided to file nomination papers in protest against the delay in junking the Kamareddy draft masterplan.
They complained that Municipal Administration Minister KTR, who had promised to scrap the draft, had not done it, and added that they are afraid that once the elections are over, the draft plan would be implemented.
They fear that if it is done, their lands would go into industrial and green zones, causing monumental loss to them.
The farmers demand that before coming out with a draft masterplan, the authorities should have taken everyone into confidence but they did not do it. If the farmers keep their word and file nominations, the election might become dicey.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, KCR’s daughter K Kavitha faced the same problem from turmeric farmers in Nizamabad. They believed that she had failed to get the Turmeric Board establish in her tenure as Nizamabad MP. It was one of the factors that led to her defeat in Nizamabad.
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