The Telangana Rastra Samithi (TRS) is finding it hard to come to grips with a harsh reality – the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on its home turf. The outcome of the 2019 general elections is an indicator of this ground reality; the saffron party secured four of the state’s 17 parliament seats, bagging 19.5% of the vote share.More shockingly for the TRS patriarch and chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, his daughter and sitting MP K. Kavitha, lost to the BJP’s Aravind Dharmapuri with a huge margin of 70,875 votes.Before the election, KCR was confident that party and its ally AIMIM would win all the 17 seats.He had hoped that with all the Lok Sabha seats in his basket, he could play a bigger role in the formation of a government at the Centre with his ‘federal front’ agenda. But the outcome of the election upended his apple-cart.The BJP’s dramatic rise baffled Telangana’s regional satrap as it did the West Bengal firebrand Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress. The verdict will raise Amit Shah’s hopes to turn KCR’s homeland into a West Bengal by 2024.As a matter of fact, the BJP was not considered as a mainstream party in Telangana until the 2014 elections. It managed to stay relevant in the two south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana by riding on the back of the Telugu Desam Party. In the 2018 state elections in Telangana, the BJP went alone and had its voter base shrunk to 6.98%. Subsequently, its representation in the state assembly fell to a single seat from five.KCR’s home turf falls for Modi’s magicWhat could be the trigger for the dramatic turn of events? The electoral reverses has forced KCR’s party to revisit its strategy. TRS leaders, told The Wire, that the chief minister needs to take a fresh look at the narrative of building the federal front as an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress. This strategy failed to work in the Lok Sabha elections.The BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, delivered a setback to leaders like Banerjee and KCR by isolating Muslims, playing up the Hindutva nationalist agenda and the perceived success of the Balakot airstrike.“We should have responded with an eye-for-eye approach to contain the BJP’s march in Telangana. But played the federal front card, which failed to match Modi’s nationalist sentiment laced with Hindutva,” commented a former MLC from the TRS on condition of anonymity. He hopes that the BJP’s nationalist agenda will be tackled in the future by subsuming it in regional sentiment. The TRS and KCR still enjoy the public’s goodwill for achieving a separate Telangana state in 2014.Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao greets Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting in New DelhiCredit: PTIOf course, the Telangana sentiment worked in the 2018 state elections like a miracle. As a result, his party rode back to power with 88 seats in the 119-seat state assembly. Armed with the agenda of self-pride for the people of Telangana, KCR decimated the Congress-TDP mahagathbandhan. The TRS won 46.87% of the votes.The Telangana sentiment got a fresh lease of life with TDP’s “Andhra leader” N. Chandrababu Naidu’s decision to campaign for the mahagathbandhan. Before 2014, Chandrashekhar Rao had built the statehood movement by depicting Naidu and the TDP as catering to the business interests of the Andhra region, leaving Telangana high and dry. If the mahagathbandhan comes to power, Naidu would once again regain control over Telangana, Rao implied.Also read: As Telangana Votes, Political Rhetoric Has Seen a Major ShiftBut in April 2019, Naidu was absent from the Telangana election scene. The mahagathbandhan had also collapsed, giving KCR little opportunity to utilise his usual mixture of regional sentiment and self-pride. Moreover, the Telangana chief minister only saw the Congress as a potential threat, ignoring the lurking danger of the saffron party.Rahul Gandhi and Chandrababu Naidu. Credit: PTIPolitical analyst Vikram Poola holds KCR’s “pro-Muslim politics” responsible for the rise of right-wing politics in Telangana. Aiming for the 12% Muslim vote, KCR found an ally in the Assaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), triggering a Hindu-Muslim divide in almost all urban pockets of Telangana. The divide obviously harbours right-wing politics.Caste coalitionSurprisingly, the Lok Sabha elections saw the consolidation of Backward Classes under the dominant Reddy caste, against the ruling TRS. Such a combination was unprecedented in Telangana’s history. Generally, the BCs who account for 52% of the Telangana’s 3.51 crore population, tend to view Reddys, who own huge chunks of land and resources, as their oppressors.Watch: Sadak Se Sansad | In Telangana’s Zahirabad, Different Cultures Co-Exist HarmoniouslyThe BCs initially backed the TDP and later the TRS, while Reddys tend to vote for the Congress. But in the Lok Sabha elections, just five months after the state elections, the TRS has lost the support of the BCs.Some suggest that the manner in which TRS Rajya Sabha member Dharmapuri Srinivas, a BC leader, was shown the door to please KCR’s daughter Kavitha, antagonised the party for BCs. KCR, who is a Velama, a feudal upper-caste community that constitutes less than 1% of the state’s population, was seen as insulting a BC leader. Kavitha eventually lost to D. Srinivas’s son, who contest on the BJP’s ticket.Backward Classes Welfare Association leader R. Krishnaiah, a former MLA, says the KCR government has left the BCs in a state of discontentment. Over the past five-and-a-half years, he said the party has failed to realise the aspirations of BCs in politics and employment. This may also have played a role in the BC votes shifting away from the party.This caste coalition against the TRS has made the party’s ranks nervous as it may upsetting KCR’s plans of ruling the state for a third time.Gali Nagaraja is a freelance journalist who writes on the two Telugu states.
