Hyderabad: There’s been high-voltage political drama for the past few days between the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the 3 November bypoll at Dubbaka constituency in Telangana.
It began last Monday, when the local police allegedly seized Rs 18.67 lakh from the home of a relative of BJP candidate Raghunandan Rao. The BJP cried foul and alleged that the money was ‘planted’ by the police. What followed was a scuffle between the police and hundreds of BJP workers.
On Sunday, Municipal Minister and TRS working president K. T. Rama Rao, or KTR as he is known, wrote to the Chief Election Commission alleging that the BJP was trying to incite violence and disrupt law and order in Hyderabad and in the state. Speaking at a press meet, KTR said his party had received a tip-off from saffron party leaders.
While the BJP is yet to respond, analysts say that the party’s growing assertion in Telangana isn’t necessarily aimed at the ruling TRS but directed at the opposition Congress.
The trends indicate an easy victory for the TRS but the BJP is looking to secure second position and push the Congress to third spot. It is part of the BJP’s larger plan to emerge as the principal opposition party in the southern state, say analysts.
“It (BJP) is getting aggressive in the state. They are aiming to get the place of Congress, which has been hit by defections to the ruling TRS,” Amarnath Kosuri, an expert on state politics, told ThePrint.
The BJP is making no bones of its ambitions. According to party MLC Ramchander Rao, the BJP wants to emerge as a ‘strong alternative’ to TRS and make sure that the Congress is no longer a political force at least by the next elections.
“We want to create an impression that we are a strong alternative to TRS and not the Congress. Congress is no more a political force in Telangana — we want to show this to people,” he said.
The BJP insists it has taken a number of steps to increase its presence in the state — from increasing its membership, forming a vernacular cell for non-Telugu people, to raising the right issues.
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The BJP outreach
Starting from revamping its state leadership in March to spending money in constituencies, mobilising the crowd – the BJP has upended its game as compared to the Congress. The Congress, for its part, has been reluctant to spend or mobilise cadre.
According to Rao, the BJP’s cadre has nearly ‘doubled’ in the last three years and is now close to 8 lakh workers in Telangana, which includes ground-level karyakartas. For every polling booth in the state, the party has allotted at least 10 workers, he said.
The Telangana BJP team also has a ‘vernacular cell’, which focuses on the non-Telugu speaking vote-bank, which according to Rao is close to 12 per cent in Hyderabad.
The MLC said the party’s focus next is the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Elections (local body polls), the process for which has begun even though the current civic body’s term ends only in February next year.
Although the TRS is likely to win a majority of the seats, the BJP is looking to see how much of the urban population support it can drum up.
“Hyderabad has about 40 percent of ‘settlers’ (non-locals),” Rao said. “And of the 150 seats or divisions, the non-local population can influence about 70 seats. These are not just people who’ve migrated from Andhra Pradesh, but also Bihar, Maharashtra among others.”
“A significant amount of the Andhra batch are TDP supporters,” he added. “Although last time a lot of TDP leaders jumped to BJP, the supporters voted for TRS. But this time we are hoping the trend would change slightly and BJP would be able to get some attention.”
An uphill task for the BJP
It may not be all smooth sailing for the BJP.
The saffron party had become almost invisible after the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. In the assembly elections of 2014, the BJP won just five of the 119 seats. In the Lok Sabha polls of that year, the party just won one of the 17 seats.
“The BJP was not vocal during the Telangana agitation and neither did they pick up until the Lok Sabha elections the second time,” Prof G. Haragopal of the University of Hyderabad told ThePrint. “So, people still voted for TRS despite the anti-incumbency. The BJP cadre failed to emerge as an alternative and Modi also had made his stand clear that he is against a new state formation.”
Neither the ‘Modi wave,’ nor the Hindutva push worked for the BJP to gain ground in Telangana which was riding high on a separate state sentiment.
The party even failed to fill the political vacuum created by the fall of the Congress in Telangana.
The Congress managed 21 assembly seats in 2014. That number dropped to 19 in the 2018 polls and to make matters worse, 12 of those legislators have defected to the TRS.
It is such defections that the BJP is hoping to cash in on. A few Congress veterans have already jumped ship to the BJP — the list includes former minister D.K. Aruna, who is now part of national president J.P. Nadda’s team.
The inability of the Congress to keep its flock together is what could be BJP’s biggest advantage. But, it’s not so easy for a party that majorly lacks a ‘pan-Telangana’ appeal.
And the assembly numbers are not encouraging. The BJP has just one MLA in the Telangana assembly — the controversial Raja Singh who was the centre of the Facebook hate row recently.
The only silver lining is that the party now has four Lok Sabha MPs.
The party’s expansion plans, however, face another major hurdle — KCR. The chief minister’s popular welfare schemes of 24-hour power supply and drinking water provision in villages have kept the rural vote-bank firmly on his side.
That leaves it with little room to counter the CM.
“The anti-minority community or a pro-Hindu sentiment that BJP uses has never worked for Telangana in a blanket style,” Jinka Nagaraju, an expert on political affairs in the state, told ThePrint. “The state does not function like that, which is why the BJP failed to create that sentiment before also.”
The BJP disagrees.
Senior BJP leader Muralidhar Rao told ThePrint that “polarisation is slowly happening in the minds of people and it will reflect on the ground, from the anti-Nizam fight to the anti-Naxal movement”, adding that this would help the party take shape, provided the state leaders accelerate the process.
“It is not a clean ground. KCR is trying to portray himself more Hindu than anyone else;we can see his focus on development of large-scale temples in the state,” Muralidhar Rao said.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The trend may now be slightly changing for the BJP. The anti-incumbency factor against TRS and the alliance between KCR and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM could help BJP divert the attention to suit its propaganda.
For instance, the BJP has for years been demanding that 17 September should officially be declared as ‘Telangana Liberation Day’, on account of Indian armed forces taking control of the princely state of Hyderabad, ending the 200-year-old Nizam rule and merging the vast Hyderabad Deccan region, which comprised present-day Telangana, parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka into India.
The BJP alleges that Owaisi’s AIMIM has been coercing the TRS government against commemorating the date.
Owaisi has been strongly opposing BJP’s demand saying such a thing would ‘open up old wounds’ and ‘such things will only promote hate ideology towards Muslims,’. He had also termed this as ‘Sangh parivar agenda.’
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