The meeting is also expected to appoint in-charges for each Lok Sabha seat and entrust them with responsibilities to coordinate among leaders.
Published Jan 07, 2024 | 8:45 AM ⚊ Updated Jan 07, 2024 | 8:45 AM
Amit Shah with BJP leaders in Telangana. (Supplied)
After Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s recent pep talk to the party workers in Hyderabad, the Telangana BJP is embarking on a two-day conference from Sunday, 7 January, to chalk out strategies to win the maximum number of Lok Sabha seats in the state.
Sunil Bansal and Tarun Chugh — BJP leaders in charge of Telangana — will attend the meeting in which the party’s state president and Union Tourism Minister G Kishan Reddy, Rajya Sabha member Dr K Laxman, and others will discuss means to meet the target of 10 Lok Sabha seats that Shah has set for them.
Though the party’s national leadership was not very happy with the performance of its Telangana unit in the recent Assembly elections, the state leaders appeared to be excited over the number of MLAs going up to eight from just one in 2018.
The party has already reviewed its performance in the Assembly elections and identified factors that had led to the victory of its leaders, some of whom won with huge majorities, even over 50,000 votes, like Alleti Maheswar Reddy, who upset former environment minister A Indrakaran Reddy at Nirmal in the erstwhile Adilabad district.
The party also assessed why it had lost several segments by a narrow margin and found a lack of coordination among the leaders resulted in the defeats.
Now, the leaders want to further tweak the party apparatus to make a difference in the Lok Sabha elections, especially as the wind is now blowing in favour of the BJP in the North.
As the elections are meant to choose between the Congress and the BJP, the saffron party’s leaders think the BRS — in power since the creation of the state in 2014 — would be irrelevant now after its flop show in the Assembly elections on 30 November, 2023.
They hope that the inauguration of the Ayodhya Ram Temple on 22 January will set the tone for the Lok Sabha elections. As the Hindutva wave is set to surge, they hope the party prospects in Telangana, too, would soar.
The BJP’s growth in Telangana has been steady since the 2018 Assembly elections. The party won only one seat — Goshamahal — back then. It lost security deposits in 103 of the 115 seats it contested in 2018.
However, it won four Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections — Adilabad, Karimnagar, Nizamabad, and Secunderabad.
The momentum continued as the party picked up Assembly seats in the by-elections in Dubbaka and Huzurabad, and significantly improved its tally in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections. This, despite it losing three byelections — Huzurnagar, Nagarjuna Sagar, and Munugode.
In the 2023 Assembly elections, the party rose like a phoenix and won eight seats and even adopted a resolution at the Kongarakalan meeting that described it as an achievement. Shah had attended the meeting.
The party not only won eight seats in the 2023 Telangana Assembly elections but also was the runner-up in 19 segments, polled between 50,000 and one lakh votes in 24 segments, and polled up to 20,000 votes each in 75 seats.
The party’s vote share, which was 6.9 percent in 2018, doubled to 14 percent. The party also took down giants K Chandrashekar Rao and A Revanth Reddy in Kamareddy.
With the Lok Sabha polls on the horizon, the party leaders are pulling up their socks to make the best use of the present conducive atmosphere.
The planned meeting is also expected to appoint in-charges for each Lok Sabha constituency and entrust them with responsibilities of coordination among leaders in the campaign.
The party believes there would not be any unwanted surprises in Adilabad, Karimnagar, and Nizamabad, though the sitting MPs from these segments lost their election to the Assembly from Boath, Karimnagar, and Korutla, respectively.
The party has more or less decided to renominate them from the three Lok Sabha seats, their electoral reverses in the Assembly elections notwithstanding.
The party will also renominate Kishan Reddy from Secunderabad; he did not contest the Assembly polls.
The party has to focus more on the remaining 13 Lok Sabha seats and win at least six of them to meet their target.
To reach the target, the party is planning to seek the help of the national leaders.
The party, at the two-day meeting, may propose that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Minister Shah, party president JP Nadda, and other top leaders address campaign meetings at least in two Assembly segments in each Lok Sabha constituency in the run-up to the general election likely to b held in April-May.
