In a way, it was a case of sweet revenge for the Congress. The national party had to wait for nearly a decade to reap the full benefits of carving out Telangana in 2014, having been outfoxed all the way by a regional party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi which renamed itself the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS).
The Congress crossed the magic figure of 60 in style (the Telangana Assembly has 119 seats) — it won 65 seats — though no optimistic political pundit would have given the party a chance to touch this number even a year ago. Going by its past performance in the last Assembly elections in 2018, it had to cover a whopping 14 percentage point difference in vote share with the BRS. Though it appeared quite challenging, the party breached the wall of invincibility built by the BRS and cut short its ambitions of going national.
It is a great resurgence by all accounts, with the Congress picking up the momentum gained from Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022 and also infusing some dynamism by banking on a fresh face, the relatively younger A. Revanth Reddy, to lead the party in the State. Having moved from the Telugu Desam Party, Mr. Revanth Reddy was not a quintessential Congressman. Overcoming the ‘outsider’ image and the anticipated resistance from the old guard, his style of targeting Chief Minister, K. Chandrasekhar Rao, by launching never-ending attacks on him, seemed to have helped the party in good measure.
