HYDERABAD: After the meeting of senior BJP leaders with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday night at Delhi on organisational changes to be made in the party and in the government in view of the fast-approaching elections to five States including Telangana, there is a buzz in the political circles that one or two MPs from Telangana might be taken into the Union Cabinet.
At the high-level meeting, attended by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, party president JP Nadda and general secretary BL Santhosh, a serious exercise is understood to have taken place to make the party strong in the poll-bound States to prevent a repeat of the Karnataka debacle.
The other states going for Assembly elections are Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Mizoram between November 2023 and January 2024. With clear signals emanating from Delhi that the Prime Minister will take a few MPs into his Cabinet from these States, the leaders in Telangana too have begun calculating their chances.
According to sources, the front runners are MPs Soyam Bapu Rao (Adilabad) and Dharmapuri Arvind (Nizamabad). The Adilabad MP who is an ST seems to have brighter chances of making it to the Cabinet in view of the BJP’s thrust on empowering tribals.
But Arvind too is trying to get into the Cabinet since he stood as a giantkiller in 2019 Lok Sabah elections by defeating BRS president and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter K Kavitha in Nizamabad.
In case the leadership decides to go for a change of guard in its Telangana unit, then the PM might take incumbent president Bandi Sanjay into the Cabinet as he too has the credit of defeating CM’s relative and senior leader B Vinod Kumar in Karimnagar. But sources said a change of guard is highly unlikely as any change in the leadership on the eve of elections would send wrong signals and might prove counter-productive.
Then, Rajya Sabha member K Laxman has also pinned his hopes on a Cabinet berth. In fact, he expected that he would be given post of governor of one of the State, in the first innings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2014-19) but could only make it to Rajya Sabha in Modi’s second innings (2019-2024). He expects to be taken as Minister of State or a minister with independent charge.