Two years into its second term in office, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) will now have to go back to the drawing board and redraw its strategies, for, it is forced for the first time to contend with, not a weakened Congress or the decimated Telugu Desam, but a real Opposition party in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In other words, the game has just begun for the 2023 elections. The fractured verdict thrown up in the keenly fought Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporat ion (GHMC) election is being seen as a reflection of public resentment over the style of functioning of the TRS leadership, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao included.
The underlying message of the results, even TRS insiders confide, is that people expect those in power to be humble, however, benevolent they might be. In fact, the party had received enough warning signs in the past but failed to sense any, thus paving the way for the sudden ascendancy of the BJP in a manner that few expected. After the impressive performance in the 2018 Assembly elections, the TRS suffered shock defeats just months later in quite a few Lok Sabha segments, including Nizamabad where KCR’s daughter, Kavitha, lost to a BJP nominee.
As recently as a month ago, the party failed to retain the rural Assembly segment of Dubbaka in the CM’s home district, again the beneficiary being the BJP. In the latest Hyderabad Corporation election, the party lost as many as 43 seats it had won in 2016 — all of them going the BJP way. There are several factors that led to the TRS poor show. Leadership losing connect with cadres, keeping promises such as jobs to the eligible youth, and inordinate delay in pay revision of employees are some of them.
Just ahead of the polls, the government doled out `10,000 to every family affected by the recent floods but there were complaints galore that the relief was cornered by TRS local leaders, without the assistance reaching the beneficiaries even as the exchequer was left poorer by a few hundred crores. On the political front, blowing hot and cold has also sown seeds of doubts in the minds of the people.
Not so long ago, the CM asserted that Majlis was an ally but in the face of the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva campaign, the TRS sought to disown the Muslim party. Obviously, it did not cut ice with the people. In the early days of Covid pandemic, KCR went out of his way to shower praises on the Prime Minister only to hurl abuses later on. In this digital age, evidence of shifting stances remains and it became too easy for the BJP to expose the ‘double standards’ of the TRS.
One cardinal mistake the TRS leadership committed was to decimate both the Congress and the TDP, buying out a majority of the legislators who were elected from either of the parties in 2018. Things have come to such a pass that people began realising the futility of voting for the Congress or the TDP as they could, in any case, walk over to the TRS. Ironically, TRS could now be reaping what it has sown. BJP leaders are hopeful that it’s only a matter of time before important functionaries of the Congress and even those unhappy in the TRS will look towards them.
For the record, the vote share of the Congress has gone down from 11 in the previous corporation election to six now while that of TDP’s plummeted from 13 to just one. The entire Opposition space has now been virtually occupied by the BJP, which has also shaved off some vote share of the TRS. Nonetheless, all is not lost for the TRS. If the leadership does not surround itself with yesmen, begins listening to the people and adopts a more democratic approach in running the administration and the party, it’s not going to be easy even for the BJP to continue its forward march in terms of electoral gains. KCR is no novice in politics. He is as shrewd as one could imagine and more than capable of lifting the party from the lowest ebb.
The TRS will have to go back to the drawing board, for it is forced for the first time to contend with, not a weakened Congress or the decimated Telugu Desam, but a real Opposition party in the BJP