Telangana Elections 2023: Can BJP’s pivot to an OBC CM checkmate BRS and Congress?

Telangana elections 2023: The BJP has been hopeful that Hindutva would gain traction in Telangana with its history of Hindu-Muslim divide during the Nizam’s rule in Hyderabad and areas contiguous with Maharashtra and Karnataka.

On October 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an election campaign in Hyderabad made a pitch for an OBC Chief Minister for poll-bound Telangana and it was endorsed by Union home minister Amit Shah, at another election rally.

BJP’s promise to anoint an OBC CM has made way for the rise of several contenders. Prominent among them being Etela Rajender, heading the party’s campaign committee, and Dr K Laxman, member of the Rajya Sabha and chairman of the party’s OBC Morcha, hailing from Mudiraj  and Munnuru Kapu community respectively. There is also Bandi Sanjay Kumar and Arvind Dharmapuri, both MPs, belonging to the Munnuru Kapus.

BJP’s OBC Strategy

Incidentally, both the Mudiraj and Munnuru Kapu communities are the predominant and most vocal OBC groups and Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao has rubbed both groups the wrong way by ill-treating Etela and Dharmapuri Srinivas, father of Arvind, when they were in BRS.

BJP’s pitch for an OBC CM is also a counter to both BRS and Congress not having leeway to experiment on this front. KCR is BRS’s default CM face from the upper-caste Velamas, and the Congress’s leading contender is Revanth Reddy, from the Reddy caste, which dominates the top leadership of the party. However, none of the contenders are a match to KCR, given his popularity as the pioneer of the statehood movement that keeps helping him tap regional sentiment to his advantage.

BJP’s top bosses appear to be playing the OBC card by taking a leaf out of its own past success. Way back in the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, the party had experimented with a similar strategy in undivided Andhra Pradesh. To its utter surprise, the BJP’s experiment with the intermediate castes – mostly OBCs – other than the politically dominant Reddys, Kammas and Kapus succeeded spectacularly in the form of four MP seats with an 18 percent vote share.

The other reason for the OBC CM strategy is the failure of the Hindutva narrative in helping the party gain further ground. Take 2018, where riding the crest of regional sentiment, KCR smashed his rivals – the Congress-led grand alliance and the BJP.

Hindutva’s Limited Traction

Back then the BJP had broken ties with the TDP and fought the election alone in 2018. The party contested on 118 out of 119 seats, hoping to reap rich dividends by excessively playing up the Hindutva card. The party inducted seer Paripoornananda Saraswati Swami of Sripeetham during its election campaign, hoping the seer would turn out to become a Yogi Adityanath in Telangana.

Swami Paripoornananda was heavily aided by Yogi and a battery of religious figures in that elections. However, the BJP ended up with a poor show, winning the lone Goshamahal seat in Hyderabad’s old city even as its candidates lost deposits in 104 seats.

The BJP has been hopeful that Hindutva would gain traction in Telangana with its history of Hindu-Muslim divide during the Nizam’s rule in Hyderabad and areas contiguous with Maharashtra and Karnataka. It was these faultlines that led Bandi Sanjay Kumar, a firebrand leader espousing hardline Hindutva, to be elevated as the state BJP president.

But after the disheartening realisation that the Hindutva brand of politics wasn’t making more inroads after an initial surge until 2021 in the sentiment-struck and caste-entrenched state, Sanjay was moved out of the state party’s post, signaling another radical shift in its poll narrative.

Meanwhile, KCR has also shrewdly countered the BJP with some typical soft-Hindutva postures, which checked the rise of saffron politics in Telangana. Foreseeing the BJP threat, especially after the party won four Lok Sabha seats with a 20 percent vote share in 2019, the Chief Minister has spoken much about how he is going about developing a cluster of temples with around Rs 1,500 crore spent by the state government like the Yadadri ( abode of Sri Lakshminarasimha Swamy), Vemulavada, Basara and Bhadhradhri temples, by allocating funds to the tune of Rs 1,500 crore.

But with BJP now betting on caste, who will it end up hurting – BRS or Congress? And will the OBC CM promise be enough to regain lost ground as the main challenger to BRS in the state? Come November 30, voters will give their answer.

Gali Nagaraja is a senior journalist, formerly associated with The Hindu, The Times of India, and Hindustan Times for over three decades. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.