For a while now in Telangana, a bypoll has been rumoured likely from the Nalgonda Lok Sabha constituency, currently held by the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS).
Such a bypoll would ostensibly have served as a mid-term poll for the TRS, a party that, despite criticism against it, has so far lacked serious challengers. The opposition parties consist of the weakened Congress (13 MLAs against the TRS’s 90), barely existent Telugu Desam Party (TDP) (3 MLAs till Friday), the Left parties (1 MLA) and the ambitious BJP (5 MLAs).
The AIMIM, led by Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, with seven MLAs is seen as a virtual ally of the TRS. Even the BJP has a more temperate relationship with the ruling party. If the CM’s son K T Rama Rao spoke scathingly of the saffron party in an interview with New Indian Express recently, his father defended the Prime Minister on the matter of employment opportunities from ‘false propaganda’.
The face of the civil society opposition has been Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) chairperson M Kodandaram, a former ally of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao during the movement for a separate state. But since 2014, the TRS has won every bypoll held in the state — two for the Lok Sabha and two to the Assembly — and swept the Hyderabad civic polls last year. One would imagine the party was sitting pretty.
However, the separate state has not meant as immediate a remedy to deep-seated issues as an electorate may have hoped. Farmers in the state have suffered drought, non-remunerative prices over the years, while villagers have battled the state’s highhandedness on land acquisition for ambitious irrigation projects. This is not to say things haven’t changed for the better, but that the TRS is perhaps wise to not take anything for granted.
To this end, the ruling party has doled out sops to virtually every category of citizens, including a sheep distribution programme for sheep-rearing communities and the promise of minority IT corridor (details are meagre on this one). This taking-nothing-for-granted approach was seen recently ahead of the union elections for the Singareni Collieries Company Limited, a government-owned mining company. Ahead of the polls in the first week of October, the chief minister caused some raised eyebrows by addressing a press conference to offer a wide range of sops to the 50,000 voters across six districts of the state. Obviously this was a matter of prestige for the government, a mini-bypoll even.
The party-backed union ended up increasing its vote share over its performance in 2012, though winning only nine out of 11 posts. The chief minister then held another press conference to celebrate the victory. Even old-timers were puzzled at how an union poll became such a big deal, others putting it down to KCR being KCR. The curious part of the press conference was the chief minister’s decision to devote a chunk of time discussing the non-merits of Kodandaram as a challenger to the party, stating that the former professor wouldn’t even be able to win a panchayat election. And yet the TJAC has had to go to court to get permission to hold its upcoming protest on unemployment.
Meanwhile, another challenger seems to have emerged — weakening one opposition party and strengthening another — one who has won some elections. After months of speculation, Revanth Reddy, the TDP MLA from Kodangal and the party’s leader in the Assembly, quit and is expected to join the Congress in the coming days. Reddy has been an especially vocal critic of the TRS government and one who appears a more serious contender to rally around than anyone in the Telangana Congress at the moment. He is also the first accused in the cash-for-votes case in which Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu has also been implicated.
A bypoll then appears inevitable, but on the terms of the Opposition rather than of the ruling party. The TRS had reportedly considered a bypoll in Nalgonda to target one of the remaining bases of Congress support in the state (the seat was won by Gutha Sukhender Reddy on a Congress ticket. He later switched to the TRS). Reddy, however, has won the Kodangal seat in Mahbubnagar district twice before, both times defeating the TRS’ Gurunath Reddy, who may be his opponent again. The stakes then are considerably high — Revanth’s political future depends on a victory here, as may well be that of the state’s Opposition. Arguably, the ruling party would absorb a defeat better though it would be both an embarrassment and rallying point against it in 2019. The TRS then can be expected to pull out all stops to swing this one.
Ranjitha Gunasekaran
Assistant Resident Editor, Telangana
Email: ranjitha@newindianexpress.com