(Jinka Nagaraju)
In Telangana’s Dubbaka Assembly constituency, where the by-election is necessitated by the sudden death of TRS MLA Solipeta Ramalinga Reddy, BJP’s M Raghunandan Rao trounced the ruling TRS party (candidate Solipeta Sujatha, wife of late MLA), though with a slender margin of 1079 votes.
Here, it is not a margin that is important, but the rise of BJP in the pocket borough chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR).
How the Telangana BJP, now for the first time led by relatively inexperienced leaders, pulled off this magic?
In fact, none of the members of the team is comparable in stature to TRS leadership. BJP leaders such as Nizamabad MP D Arvind, Karimnagar MP B Sanjay Kumar, candidate Raghunandan Rao himself, who led the campaign, are amazingly low profile, local leaders, while TRS is commandeered by veteran minister T Harish Rao.
How did the tragedy struck the TRS?
The reasoning looks unbelievably simple: It is TRS regionalism (Bangaru Telangana) versus BJP localism. Team BJP articulated the hyper-local so well that it struck a chord with Dubbaka voters.
The TRS banked on the sympathy factor to work for the widow of the deceased Husband, which did not work at all.
BJP, instead of solely depending on its core plank of Hindu politics, converted the bypoll campaign into a pure local electoral narrative. the Modus operandi is too unconventional and silent.
Dubbaka falls in the district of Siddipet, which is the home district of KCR where he is an unbeatable force.
Most importantly Dubbaka assembly constituency is located a short distance from the state’s most happening constituencies Gajwel, Sircilla, and Siddpet, represented by three pillars of the government, chief minister KCR, IT and Municipal Administration Minister KT Ramarao ( CM’s son), and Finance minister T Harish Rao (CM’s nephew) respectively. This fact has been used as a powerful tool to hit at TRS by the BJP campaign teams.
The question how the Dubbaka constituency fared compared to the nearby VIP constituencies of Siddipet, Gajwel and Sircilla has become the core issue of the BJP’s campaign.
The argument is that the constituency was not developed as much as it should have been. The Constituency has been neglected in all spheres as the TRS leadership was more interested in creating safe havens for themselves.
“We highlighted this point everywhere we went. This is the question we posed to everybody we met during the course of our door to door campaign,” said J Chandrasekhar, a representative of ProNamo (Professionals for Narendra Modi).
The ProNamo group, comprising mostly of software professionals from Hyderabad, campaigned for BJP voluntarily for two months. According to Chandra, their teams covered each booth area twice in half of the constituency.
“We did not take any local leader along with us. We worked voluntarily. We explained to the voters that we are not paid- workers. We are software and other professionals with huge salaries. People believed us as sincere. We spoke only on hyper-local issues like broken-promise of double-bedroom houses, lack of recruitment for the government jobs, health problems of women-beedi workers, etc. We even explained to the voters about the sources of old age pension they are getting. We told them that 90 percent of the pension is covered by PM Modi’s funds,” Chandra told The Lede.
“When we told about the broken promises of TRS government, people found a convincing reason. We told the youth about the fate o the promised one lakh jobs in government and unemployed allowance, they agreed with us. Since the campaign run by the youth and non-politicians, it has gone down well with the local people,” he said.
BJP’s Raghunandan Rao, a former journalist, also struck a chord with the youth who are a disappointing lot due to severe joblessness in the state.
“A recent survey revealed that with 33 percent unemployment Telangana is below the national average in joblessness among youth. Against this backdrop, Raghunandan also repeatedly raised the issue of unfulfilled employment promises of TRS. Rao was taken much more seriously than the Congress leaders on this count,” a journalist who covered the campaign said.
The BJP team, instead of promising heaven, cleverly paid more attention to demystify the TRS welfare agenda. This worked wonders, he opined.
State finance minister T Harish Rao was made in charge of the party’s campaign as he is also seen as the troubleshooter of the TRS. However, Harish Rao, the most popular leader in the area, failed to pull off any magic in the election.
He held around 500 impressive rallies and roadshows across the constituency. All this remained largely a stage-managed show. He had to gracefully own the moral responsibility for the Dubbaka debacle, after the declaration of TRS defeat. Compared to the 2018 general election, the TRS vote share shrunk by 16.5 percent, remarkable erosion indeed.
The Dubbaka’s louder message to Congress
The Dubbaka debacle, especially the rise of BJP in TRS stronghold, has a clear message that it is not the Congress but the BJP that will be the future alternative to TRS in the state.
BJP is likely to amplify this message to repeat the show in next month’s Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Elections, a prestigious election for KTR, the second in command in the KCR government.
The Dubbaka debacle has delivered a double whammy to Congress. The Congress, the opposition party in Assembly, has not only finished as a poor third but also exposed its vulnerability that it is difficult for it to re-emerge in Telangana.
This is set to pave the path for the arrival of BJP in state politics. The decline in the Congress’ area of influence is bound to benefit the BJP post-Dubbaka.
Prof S Simhadri, a former professor from Osmania University, said Dubbaka has all the potential to lead the state to take Right turn.
“Congress’ decline looks unstoppable. The aggressive and innovative campaign styles the BJP deploying are bound to enthuse the disillusioned youth in the absence of other voices. Dubbaka has demonstrated this unquestionably,” Prof Simhadri said.
Telangana people have never been favorably disposed towards BJP. And the region has never been amenable to the emotive planks of the saffron party in the past. Advani Rath Yatra, Vajpayee’s NDA government, later Narendra Modi’s entry could not enthuse the voter of Telangana till now.
If the message of the Dubbaka debacle, that Congress can’t be revived in the state, is understood by the people across Telangana, voters are likely to take the saffron party as the dependable alternative to TRS.
It is clear that Dubbaka has all favorable conditions to defeat the ruling TRS. But, Congress failed to rose up to the occasion while a former protégé of KCR hit the bull’s eye as a BJP candidate.
What is more glaring is the Congress’ inability to reinvent itself like the BJP to steal the thunder from TRS. BJP had a well-planned strategy and launched the campaign much before other parties did. The party could rope in scores of youth from Hyderabad who did the campaign for it surreptitiously in a non-conventional way.
So, the BJP hopes that the Dubbaka debacle effect will surely be felt in GHMC elections scheduled in December. GHMC election is taking place at a when the city life was battered by unprecedented floods which made the TRS government unpopular in the eyes of Urban voters. So, the BJP, riding on the wave of Dubbaka, is bound to replicate the Dubbaka campaign model to exploit the failure of GHMC, which is under control of KT Ramarao, minister for municipal administration & urban development (MA&UD) and the second in command in the TRS government.
(The article is first published in thelede.in)