HYDERABAD: While the BJP suffered a setback in its strongholds such as Uttar Pradesh in the 18th Lok Sabha elections, the saffron party has finally arrived in Telangana and doubled its 2019 tally of four seats.
The Congress, which was hoping for a double-digit tally after its victory in the 2023 Assembly polls in the state, had to settle for eight seats, the same as the BJP. The vote share of the Congress nevertheless went up from 27.79% in the 2019 LS election to 40.1%. This was even slightly more than the 39.4% of votes that it had bagged in the recent Assembly polls. The Congress tally rose from three in 2019 to eight. The party retained two of its seats but failed to hold on to Malkajgiri, from where Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy had won in 2019.
AIMIM supremo Asaduddin Owaisi won from Hyderabad, defeating the BJP’s Madhavi Latha comfortably by more than 3.3 lakh votes.
The BRS, which bagged 39 seats in the Assembly polls, failed to win even in a single segment in the Lok Sabha elections, its worst performance since the party was launched in 2001. The pink party’s vote share plummeted from 41.71% in 2019 to less than 17% and eight of its candidates even lost their deposits.
Many of the erstwhile voters of the BRS appear to have backed the BJP, which could replace the pink party as the principal challenger to the Congress. The saffron party’s vote share rose from 19.65% in 2019 and 13.9% in the recent Assembly polls to over 35%. The BJP not only retained all the four seats that it had won in 2019 but added four more to its kitty — Chevella, Malkajgiri, Mahbubnagar and Medak, which it bagged for the first time after Ale Narendra’s victory in 1999. The BJP won all the seats by a comfortable margin except for Mahbubnagar — the CM’s home segment — where its national vice president DK Aruna won by 4,500 votes.
Meanwhile, the extensive campaign by former Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, who covered almost all Parliament constituencies in 22 days, didn’t seem to have any effect on the performance of the BRS, which managed to come second in only two constituencies. Even in its erstwhile stronghold of Medak LS seat — Chandrasekhar Rao’s Gajwel Assembly segment and former minister Harish Rao’s Siddipet are part of it — the BRS was relegated to third spot.