After winning two consecutive state elections riding on his leadership of the movement that achieved Telangana statehood, K Chandrashekar Rao of the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi knows a tough and challenging task awaits him on the road to a hattrick of assembly poll victories.
Rao, popularly known by his initials KCR, is serving a tenure that expires only in December this year with the next elections scheduled sometime in November. Buffeted by undercurrents of anti-incumbency, KCR is poised to face a triangular slugfest against the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress.
KCR’s Unmatched Stature
Yet he remains his audacious self, perhaps knowing that his rivals’ handicaps are his biggest strength. Frankly speaking, there is no leader from the various shades of opposition – as tall as KCR – in terms of stature, popularity and crowd-pulling ability. Rao is master of the political art of catching his rivals off-guard and hitting them in his typical Telangana idiom and dialect. Leaders from the opposition ranks still need to go a long way to match him in striking the right chord with people.
The talk of early polls is one of such tricks that the master showman in KCR apparently is playing out off and on from his repertoire of such tricks, says his critics. He aims to catch not only the rivals from the opposition camp but also from his own party off-guard with such ploys. But with his term scheduled to expire in just nine months, KCR going for early polls by dissolving the house without any valid reason is almost ruled out.
The rebranding of the TRS as BRS and projecting himself as a challenger of Narendra Modi in national politics is also part of his strategy to deflect public attention from people’s discontent against his rule. In the process of his crusade against the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, Chandrasekhar Rao has deftly projected a secular image and built an alternative narrative to attract anti-Hindutva forces like the Left parties to his side. Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM is already in KCR’s corner.
BJP Losing Momentum?
This is all in response to the BJP’s dramatic resurgence in the 2019 general elections on his home turf. After trouncing the invincible TRS, the previous avatar of the BRS, in the two bypolls in Dubbak and Huzurabad and making inroads in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) civic polls, the saffron party is winning a perception battle that it is only the opposition party capable of unseating KCR.
With Bandi Sanjay Kumar, a youthful and spirited RSS karyakarta from the dominant OBCs, as its state president, the BJP helps to gain from the optics of great power projection. But the BJP is still not having a pan-Telangana presence. It can make its presence in not more than 30 out of 119 assembly segments in the state.
Opening of floodgates for defectors from almost all parties has upset the ecosystem in the BJP, founded on a strong ideological base. BJP now has defectors from the Congress, the TDP, the BRS and even the left-wing extremist groups. The influx of turncoats has triggered an intra-party loyalist-defector war, disturbing the top brass in Delhi.
Such a worrying situation has warranted that Union home minister Amit Shah, second-in-command in the party, and national party president JP Nadda call an emergency meeting with the state leadership on February 28 to put its house in order in the wake of a buzz of early polls in Telangana.
Congress Vs Congress
The Congress under the leadership of the dynamic A Revanth Reddy is desperately trying to regain lost ground in Telangana. But the plight of Revanth is reminiscent of Karna in the epic battle at Kurukshetra ho became the victim of a slew of curses.
Even as he has been on a foot march across Telangana, exposing the “misrule” of KCR, it has turned out to be a lonely battle for want of cooperation from seniors from within his party. Backed by seniors such as N Uttamkumar Reddy and Batti Vikramarka, Alleti Maheshwar Reddy, chairman of the AICC’s programme implementation committee, launched a padayatra parallel to the Revanth’s show.
Meanwhile, party MP Komatireddy Venkat Reddy has said he is also planning to undertake either a bus yatra or padayatra in southern parts of Telangana soon. Thus, simmering group rivalries may cost the grand old party heavily in the polls.
With a pan-Telangana presence, the Congress is able to put up a strong fight with the TRS in at least 70 assembly seats. Yet, it fails to win public confidence that it can send KCR packing for reasons such as intra-party factions and its inability to keep its flock against poaching by rivals.
With a triangular contest in the offing, KCR is banking on the imminent split in the opposition votes giving him the advantage, and the last laugh.
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.
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