SANGAREDDY: Erstwhile Medak district has always been a stronghold for TRS. It is the home of party chief K Chandrasekhar Rao, and his nephew Harish Rao. The region has 10 Assembly segments. Seven of them make up the whole of Medak, and three are part of Zahirabad Lok Sabha constituencies. Nine of them went to TRS in the 2018 Assembly election.
Since TRS has won both seats, it would suggest nothing has really changed for the pink party. But a deeper look at segment-wise polling numbers shows that the party has gotten fewer numbers in these elections than in the Assembly polls. It is, therefore, not surprising that both candidates -- Medak’s K Prabhakar Reddy and Zahirabad’s BB Patil -- won by smaller margins than they did in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Prabhakar Reddy won with a victory margin of 3.60 lakh votes in 2014, but this year this number has been reduced, albeit marginally, to 3.40 lakh.
In the 2018 Assembly polls, while TRS lost Sangareddy segment to Congress, it still managed to get 71,394 votes. In the Lok Sahba polls, this number reduced by 10,000 votes. The biggest fall has perhaps been in Siddipet — 1,31,285 votes in 2018 to 78,102 votes in 2019.
Similar numbers have been seen in Dubbak, Medak, Andole and Patancheru Assembly segments as well.
In Zahirabad, the race was quite close. BB Patil had won with a victory margin of 1,44,631 in 2014. This time, however, he secured only 6,229 votes more than the runner-up, Congress’ Madan Mohan Rao. In Zahirabad Assembly segment, Rao got more votes than Patil. This is quite surprising since TRS had won segment in 2018 with 96,362 votes. In 2019, this number was only 59,799.
TRS cadres in the region are simply unable to accept the fact that Zahirabad could have actually slipped out of their hands. In Medak, they were hoping to increase Prabhakar Reddy’s victory margin. That this number has only down, and not up, has indeed come as a rude shock to the party.