STATE OF PLAY
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited BJP corporators of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) to New Delhi for an informal meeting this month, he sent out two messages. The first was to show that the BJP is a party which gives importance to grassroots leaders and that these leaders have access to the top leadership, in sharp contrast to the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) where Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao’s official residence-cum-office is out of bounds for even his own ministers. The second was that the top leadership is serious about the 2023 Assembly elections in Telangana where it expects to mount a serious challenge to the TRS. After Karnataka and Puducherry, the BJP sees Telangana as the next best bet for its expansion in the south.
The party created history two years ago when it won as many as 48 seats (from just four in 2016) in the 150-member GHMC civic body. In the Assembly elections of 2018, Raja Singh from Goshamahal was the only BJP candidate to win a seat, but in the 2019 general elections, the party performed well. In Nizamabad, the BJP’s D. Aravind defeated Mr. Rao’s daughter Kavitha. In, Secunderabad, which is a BJP stronghold, Union Minister for Tourism, Culture and Northeast Development G. Kishan Reddy won. Bandi Sanjay Kumar, who was then official spokesperson of the party and is now BJP State president, won in Karimnagar. The party also won Adilabad unexpectedly. Later, it won won two Assembly bypolls — Dubbaka and Huzurabad — decisively by fielding M. Raghunandan Rao and Eatala Rajender, who were earlier with the TRS.
