BJP focuses on reserved seats in its Telangana mission

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit in Telangana has started preparing for the Assembly polls in the state and is especially focusing on the 31 reserved Assembly constituencies of Telangana in its mission to emerge as an alternative to the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in 2023. The saffron party had appointed former parliamentarian and senior party leader, A.P. Jithender Reddy, in-charge of 19 Scheduled caste constituencies, while former parliamentarian Garikapati Mohan Rao, is looking after the scheduled tribe seats. In the run-up to the polls, the BJP had also planned to hold statewide padayatras in five phases to exploit the anti-incumbency sentiments against the ruling dispensation of the state. After the second Covid wave, the state unit organized the first phase named Praja Sangrama Padayatra from the Bhagyalakshmi temple in Hyderabad led by state president Bandi Sanjay. Many drew parallels of this with late Rajshekhar Reddy’s padayatra during the 2000s which changed the politics of the state. Top BJP leaders, including Home minister Amit Shah, and party president J.P. Nadda are going to participate in the padayatra. The party leadership aims to touch more than 3,000 villages of the state during the five phases.
Talking to The Sunday Guardian, M. Raghunathan Rao, a senior leader of Telangana BJP, said, “Previously, we were not in serious contest as TRS used to evoke the issue of regionalism in the elections, and we were not able to counter the propaganda. But, since the 2019 election, the party has been working hard on the ground. You saw the outcome: we won a good number of seats in the 2019 parliamentary polls. Our performance in the reserved seats was quite good. Hence, we are now doing specific outreach in those areas. We have strengthened our party structure in all the 119 assembly segments in the last one year. The success in the recent Huzurabad Assembly bypoll had energized the cadre. The party had divided responsibility among the senior leaders.”
In the Huzurabad Assembly bypoll, the BJP’s candidate Etela Rajender won by a margin of more than 20,000 votes. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP won four seats in Telangana, its highest ever in the state and got roughly 20% vote share.
Political analysts and experts feel that the saffron party is taking the 2023 Assembly polls very seriously and is hoping to emerge as one important pillar in the electoral landscape of Telangana. “Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was not in the picture in this southern state. In 2014, under united Andhra Pradesh, the BJP fought on just 58 seats out of 294 Assembly segments. But, now it is a force to reckon with. It had made inroads within the different communities of the state. Moreover, it is also banking upon the anti-incumbency faced by KCR government, as the TRS has been ruling since the last eight years. The saffron party had also got resources to mobilize the cadres who make a favourable political atmosphere on the ground. We have been told by the state leadership that the party is seriously focusing on 70 Assembly constituencies for the upcoming state assembly elections,” said Laxmi K. Reddy, a political analyst based in Hyderabad.
In the last Telangana Assembly polls held in 2018, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) won 88 Assembly seats, while the Indian National Congress (INC) won 19 seats and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) had won seven seats. The BJP had won only one seat, but its vote share was the third highest in the state after the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the Congress.