On jubilee, BRS need long-term strategy
This Sunday, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) turns 25. The party is leaving no stone unturned to make the occasion an affair to remember, with the highlight being the re-emergence of its chief K Chandrasekhar Rao to galvanise the cadre. Mostly confined to his farmhouse since the party’s consecutive debacles at the last assembly and Lok Sabha elections, the former chief minister of Telangana is expected to pick up the political cudgels again.
With the heir apparent, former IT minister K T Rama Rao, energetically going at the government, the cadres have reason to hope. But KCR has other problems to deal with, too. For one, there are the ongoing enquiries into the Kaleshwaram project and Formula-E case. Then there are reports of a simmering internal feud within his family. His son KTR, daughter Kavitha and nephew Harish Rao are reportedly not working harmoniously with the party. The differences are so sharp that party insiders themselves are talking about them, apart from the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP. The cadres are hoping KTR would also breathe life into the demand for fresh bypolls. After 10 of its legislators switched loyalties to the Congress, the BRS filed pleas with the assembly speaker and the Supreme Court to get them disqualified. But it’s a road not without hurdles. If KCR were to demand bypolls, he could be seen as prejudicing the judicial process. The Supreme Court had pulled up Chief Minister Revanth Reddy for remarks on the bypolls in the assembly.
A better option for the BRS would be to focus on the local body elections that are not far away, though the dates have not been decided yet. If the party can make a mark at these, it will be a morale booster. For that, just one public meeting would not suffice. It is obvious that agitating can only be a short-term tactic. The BRS needs a long-term strategy to put up a fight against the Congress and the BJP. The latter two are aggressively courting the state’s numerically-strong backward communities. In such a scenario, mistaking tactics for strategy could make things worse for the BRS.