After having been largely successful in painting the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) as the ‘B’ team of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Telangana Assembly elections last year, the Congress plans to employ the same strategy for the Parliament elections as well.
The indication was clear when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that having defeated the ‘BJP’s B-team, BRS’ in the Assembly elections, the Congress will take down the A-team itself in the Lok Sabha elections.
The strategy paid dividends to the party in the Telangana Assembly elections when voters believed in some kind of unwritten and secret understanding between the BJP and BRS. The events a year before and leading up to the elections like the removal of an aggressive Bandi Sanjay Kumar as the state BJP chief, as he was a strong critic of then chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, had indeed created that perception in the State. Despite the best of efforts by both the BRS and the BJP to deny any tacit understanding, the perception could not be altered.
