The South India Times
(Spcl Correspondent)
Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s address to the party MLAs and MPs on Tuesday over the preparation for next year’s assembly elections gives us an indication of the way things are shaping in the state, in terms of political battles. He pretty much declared that the elections will be held as per schedule in December 2023 and asked his party functionaries to focus on constituencies and people’s problems. He has thus dropped clear hints that he seems to have put his ambitious ‘national role’ on hold for the time being. In other words, before the elections could call his bluff in other states across the country, he himself decided to back down.
It is probably from a realization that the ground is slipping from under his feet with the BJP becoming more aggressive in its ‘Mission South’ agenda. Moreover, the BJP has proved a point or two by significantly increasing its vote share from single-digits to three-to-four fold in the recently held Munugode assembly by-poll, taking the fight closer to the doorstep of KCR. This is no exaggeration as KCR himself has told his party men at the meeting that the Congress is almost ‘finished’. The Congress nominee forfeited her deposit at the Munugode poll.
Another factor which points towards KCR’s national ambitions being put in cold storage is the fact that he declared that all sitting MLAs will be given tickets. He wanted them to spend more time over the next 10 months and rigorously try and redress people’s woes. In other words, he had put the onus on his party’s sitting MLAs to pull up their socks or perish. It cannot be a replay of the Munugode by-poll where he could press in the entire government machinery and other resources like MLAs, MPs, and MLCs, besides spending huge sums in cash and shower gifts to the electorate.It is no secret that when KCR commissioned the IPAC and held serious meetings with its founder Prashant Kishor, he was told in unequivocal terms that more than 50 percent of the sitting MLAs are non-performers.
Against this backdrop, one may have to analyze every move of KCR’s, who had boasted of upstaging the BJP-led Government at the Centre in 2024. Perhaps, Munugode’s result seems to have forced KCR and his party men to recalibrate their strategy. Whatever may have been the underlying reason, it was always clear as daylight to a lay individual too that KCR and his TRS or BRS had no to hold outside Telangana. How many assembly seats, leave alone Lok Sabha constituencies, can his party hope to win even in neighbouring states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka or for that matter, Maharashtra? He is virtually a political stranger in states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Bihar and almost the entire northern and north eastern belt in the country. His talk of going ‘national’ always appeared to be just that—‘talk’ or ‘hot air’. Tricks like planting stories in a section of the media (loyal to him) claiming that his erstwhile trusted soldier-turned-bitter political foe Etela Rajender is thinking of a ‘Ghar wapasi’ did not cut ice with the readers or political analysts. What is more astonishing is that except that single daily, none carried this outlandish story.
And the cat was out of the bag when news reports suggested that Etela Rajender, who had been given a task by the BJP party high command along with the narrowly lost party nominee Komatireddy Rajasekhar Reddy, were apparently in the national capital to brief the reasons behind the party’s ‘understandable debacle’ and other issues. Shouldn’t the media be more careful while falling for such hearsay by vested interested groups? What is more astonishing is that the story lacks any credibility on the face of it as it did not neither quote any responsible party functionary of either party.
