HYDERABAD: After his coronation as Telangana BJP president, former MLC N Ramchander Rao now has to brace for the challenges that lie ahead of him.
The immediate one is preparing the party for the local body elections, which have to be held by the end of September. Then, there is the by-election coming up for filling the Jubilee Hills Assembly seat, which would test his leadership acumen, as the seat was held by the BRS.
Next year, he would have to ace the test of leading the party to victory in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections, for which groundwork had already been laid by Bandi Sanjay Kumar when he was the president of the BJP Telangana unit.
In the long run, the new president would have to rise to the challenge of leading the party to become an alternative to the ruling Congress in the state and make a bid for power in the Assembly elections in 2028.
Ramchander Rao will have to build the party on the foundation already laid by his predecessors. The saffron party won eight MLAs in the 2023 Assembly Elections and an equal number of Lok Sabha seats in the 2024 general elections.
The euphoria has helped the party win two MLC seats — one graduates’ segment and the other teachers’ — held recently. For Ramchander Rao, the ensuing local body elections will be an acid test.
These elections are crucial as they lay the party’s foundation across the state and prepare the cadre for future electoral challenges. The first election will mostly be for panchayats, and then polls for MPPs and ZPTCs will take place.
The party’s national leadership is keen that the new skipper should make the best use of the party’s victory in eight Lok Sabha constituencies, whose Assembly segments lie in rural areas, and build on the goodwill that is perceived to be existing for the saffron party.
Efforts are on to convert the vote share of the party—35% — in the Lok Sabha elections into a traditional vote bank, and for that, the party will have to keep the cadres always warm and battle-ready.
But the job is easier said than done, as the party does not have enough leaders with deep pockets in the hinterland of Telangana. Moreover, the ruling Congress and principal opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) have a strong presence in villages and suffer from no dearth of candidates in the elections.
Sources in the BJP said that Ramchander Rao’s talent in quelling gusts of dissent in the party would be put to test, as facing elections with the party remaining a divided house might spell doom for its prospects.
In fact, the GHMC elections next year are crucial for the party, and at present, it would have to consolidate the gains it had made in the Assembly segments that are part of the Lok Sabha constituencies in Hyderabad.
In the last elections to the GHMC, the BJP won 46 divisions, and now the party would not only have to retain them but also make sincere efforts to increase the number significantly to capture power in the civic body. Interestingly, the new president hails from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation limits and had served as a corporator in his early political career.
Meanwhile, the party is also focusing on the Jubilee Hills by-election, where the sitting BRS MLA Maganti Gopinath passed away recently. The by-poll might be held before November this year. The BJP won Secunderabad, Malkajgiri, Medak, and Chevella Lok Sabha seats, and Jubilee Hills comes under Kishan Reddy’s Secunderabad Lok Sabha seat. The result will be a barometer for the party’s image in Hyderabad.
The BJP will also have to sharpen its political weapons, as the ruling Congress and the BRS are sure to attack the saffron party for not posting a BC leader as party president, though the BJP leaders claim that the interests of the BCs always come first for them.
The ruling Congress claims that it is the only party that has a BC leader as president. Already, Union Minister of State Bandi Sanjay Kumar had said that the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate will be a BC only, and that there was no deviation from the party’s stance on it.