Major political parties in Telangana — the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS), Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party — appear to have adopted a twin-pronged strategy to win the year-end Assembly elections by first announcing candidates for the 119 seats ahead of the election notification.
The BRS president and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, based on a series of surveys conducted by independent agencies and also internal feedback gathered through ground-level sources, has shortlisted the names for the ensuing elections. The BRS chief has assured the sitting MLAs that they are likely to get the nod yet again. Only in the worst-case scenario, incumbent legislators with a dismal track record and facing strong anti-incumbency are set to be dumped. . Some ruling party MLAs want to step down and pave way for their kith and kin.
Mr. Rao intends to replicate the experiment he had done in the 2018 elections by announcing the list of BRS (then TRS) candidates in advance. That year, all the sitting BRS MLAs got the ticket. Evidently, the Congress and the BJP — not having started the exercise by then — were in a state of shock. The calculated gamble paid off as the BRS won 88 seats in the election, leaving the Opposition parties in tatters.
