BJP's newfound enthusiasm is being seen as a resolve to hinder the Congress by splitting the vote it might be taking away from the BRS.
Published Nov 27, 2023 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Nov 27, 2023 | 8:00 AM
Attendees at a BJP election rally. (BJP4Telangana/X)
There is no denying the fact that the BJP has bounced back in Telangana in the last 10 days. As the polling day for Assembly elections on 30 November draws closer, it has begun sprouting green shoots.
Till recently, it remained deflated under the relentless onslaught of the Congress and the BRS.
After the issue of notification for the Assembly elections, the BJP’s graph plummeted to abysmal depths. Pre-poll surveys began predicting not more than a maximum of five seats.
But its fortunes have begun looking up with the entry of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president JP Nadda, and a battery of party stalwarts. Their campaign is getting some traction with the voters.
The BJP, which has always been considered an underdog in Telangana, has shown promise since 2019.
A year earlier, the party’s performance in the Assembly elections was a near-disaster. It won only the Goshamahal Assembly constituency and lost all of the 114 seats it contested in the state. It even forfeited security deposits in 105 seats.
But in a matter of a few months, it acquired life once again. In the 2019 general elections, the party won four Lok Sabha seats from Telangana, which came as a surprise.
The party, which polled a mere seven percent of the votes in 2018, showed significant improvement in the Lok Sabha elections by securing 19.65 percent of the votes.
After that, it made smart gains, but also hit speed bumps. It has won two by-elections since 2018 — Dubbaka (2020) and Huzurabad (2021) — but lost three: Huzurnagar (2019), Nagarjuna Sagar (2021), and Munugode (2022).
The BJP’s performance in the GHMC elections in 2020 was remarkable. It increased its number of seats from four in 2016 to 48, emerging as the second-largest party in the local body, ahead of AIMIM. It fought a valiant battle with the BRS (then TRS) and wrested several seats from it, causing its count to drop from 99 to 56.
The BJP national leadership had great expectations from Telangana, as it is the only state in the south that offered promise after Karnataka. The saffron party hoped to spread in the South using both Telangana and Karnataka as its gateways.
Telangana, with its history of Nizam rule, appeared a fertile ground for the saffron party to sink its roots into the virgin soil. Accordingly, it targeted the AIMIM, calling it communal and one that dictated terms to BRS chief and Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.
It intended to kill two birds with one stone — the BRS and the AIMIM — by exposing the “nexus” between them and how they portended a threat to the very existence of Hindutva.
The BJP, which is contesting 111 seats in the upcoming, 30 November Assembly elections, hopes to give a tough fight to its rivals in at least 30 segments, which include Karimnagar, Korutla, and Huzurabad — where Bandi Sanjay, Arvind Dharmpuri, and Eatala Rajender are in the fray — apart from Mudhole, Nirmal, Nizamabad Urban, and of course Goshamahal, the lone seat it won in the 2018 Assembly election.
The party considers these 30 its priority seats, while there are about 15 seats in the second category in which it can only hope to increase its vote share. They include Musheerabad and Kamareddy, where the BJP would make its presence felt.
In Kamareddy, though the BJP has a very good candidate in K Venkata Ramana Reddy, he might not be able to face the two giants who are in the fray: KCR and Congress state president A Revanth Reddy.
Nonetheless, he has been campaigning with enthusiasm as he happens to be a local and is very well known in the constituency. He has been communicating the message that he would be available to the people if they vote for him, unlike KCR and Revanth, who are not only outsiders but are also inaccessible.
The BJP has been relying on emotive issues, which are aplenty in its political repertoire. Though it may not be able to win the elections, it is giving its best shot, as its improvement at the ground level would work as the foundation for future growth, especially for the Lok Sabha elections slated for next year.
After all, the saffron party always has both short-term and long-term objectives in mind and works accordingly.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the meeting at the Parade Grounds in Secunderabad. (X)
The BJP is going about its campaigning in a very calculated manner. Prime Minister Modi steers clear of any communally emotive issues, but Amit Shah incites communal passions.
Modi has lately been harping on sub-categorisation of the Scheduled Castes (SCs), apparently with an intent to win the hearts of the Madigas, who constitute a large portion of the SCs in Telangana.
He attended a meeting in Secunderabad recently where he endorsed the demand for sub-categorisation of SCs, and only on Saturday, he asked top officials of the Union government to constitute a committee that he had promised to look into the issue.
It is no brainer to know that his statement on 11 November was only to improve the sagging morale of the BJP, which was at its lowest ebb then.
Modi’s recent stress on making a Backward Class (BC) candidate the chief minister of the state in the event of the party coming to power appears to have split up the BC votes in the hope that he would be able to cut deeper into the Congress’ chunk rather than that of the BRS.
According to the 2011 census, the SC population in Telangana was 54,32,680, of whom Madigas numbered 32,33,642 and Malas accounted for 15,27,143. The figure jumped to 75 lakh (all Dalits put together) in the comprehensive family survey done by the Telangana government in 2014, which is about 18 percent of the state’s total population.
Now, it is quite possible that the party’s vote share could improve after Krishna Madiga, who has a lot of credibility among Madigas, gave a call to back the BJP in the Assembly elections.
In fact, Modi was trying to refurbish the image of the BJP at the national level, which had lately taken a hit with its varnashrama dharma narrative.
Meanwhile, the BJP appears to have been successful in building a narrative that KCR is corrupt and that he earned millions in the execution of the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme for his son KTR, whom he wants to be his successor, and this seems to be getting some attention.
KCR is also touching a raw nerve with students and the youth, who see the BRS as not providing jobs to them — as one of three basic premises on which the Telangana movement was built by the BRS chief.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah at a BJP election rally in Telangana. (BJP4Telangana/X)
Then there is Amit Shah, who has been whipping up communal passions and referring to the days when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel “liberated” the Hyderabad state from the clutches of the Nizam.
He has also offered to celebrate Hyderabad Liberation Day as a state event and build a memorial for the 96 Hindus who died in a massacre in Bairanpally in 1948, which is now in the Warangal district, allegedly at the hands of the Nizam’s militia.
Shah has also promised that the date of the massacre — 27 August — would be observed as “Razakar Horrors Day”.
The BJP’s newfound enthusiasm is being seen as a resolve to decimate the Congress at any cost by splitting the vote it might be taking away from the BRS.
Leaders of the Congress, too, have assessed that any increase in the BJP’s vote share will dent their prospects severely. Congress has assessed that the BJP polling more than eight percent of the votes will pose a threat to its prospects of gaining a simple majority.
BJP leaders have openly stated that between the BRS and the Congress, it would rather have the former come to power. This is because it does not want the Congress to grow anywhere as it is a national threat to the saffron party. The BRS, confined to Telangana, might not pose any danger to the BJP’s national plans.
Viewed in this scenario, the efforts to speed up the BJP campaign are very calibrated. As its prospects of winning the elections are ruled out, it wants to add muscle to the campaign to the extent that it would be able to cut into the Congress votes and thus prevent it from snatching the keys to the corridor of powers in the state from the BRS.
Said senior journalist and political analyst N Radha Krishna: “The BRS is happy to see the BJP’s voting percentage rise, as it knows it helps its candidates in the final analysis.”
He added: “As the BJP is fielding three of its sitting MPs (Aravind Dharampuri, Soyam Bapu Rao, and Bandi Sanjay Kumar), the BJP’s voting percentage will be more not only in the Assembly segments they are contesting from but also in the other segments that are part of their Lok Sabha constituencies.”
