Hyderabad: The election campaign for the fourth phase of polling came to an end under the scorching heat on Saturday. Despite temperatures ranging from 41-49 degrees, the leadership campaigned hard for the first time in recent memory. With the last minute interim bail to Kejriwal, focus has once again shifted to Chandra Babu Naidu succumbing to Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) pressure tactics in ensuring, what some analysts have termed, ‘an alliance of the unwilling.’
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In Telangana, the Congress campaign began from the strength of its victory in the recently concluded assembly elections. It took a few months for the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) to chalk out its campaign strategy and come out of the setback that the defeat had meant. After a long time, from southern states, a vocal, aggressive and energetic voice could be heard from Congress’s ranks.
It must be said, that in this Lok Sabha elections, Telangana chief minister Revanth Reddy became the star campaigner and also the one who shifted the terms of the poll debate onto reservations, pushing the bigwigs from the ruling BJP to adopt a defensive stance. BJP even roped in the RSS chief who had actually brought the question of reservations into dispute at regular intervals since 2014. This debate from Telangana found common cause with the debate in the rest of the country too about the constitution and protection of constitutionalism from the clutches of BJP. Unlike earlier, the Congress high command mandatorily confined the entire state cabinet to their respective parliamentary constituencies to make sure to not leave any loose ends in its push towards victory in the parliamentary elections.
Surprisingly, the BJP’s Muslim-centric clarion call could not cut much ice with the public at large. Still, in some constituencies situated in northern Telangana, which is traditionally an RSS stronghold, sections of youngsters and those either owning businesses or aspiring to own them look up to Modi and are in awe of his aura. A surprising win for BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections was Nizamabad’s Dharmapuri Aravind who is the son of former Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president D. Srinivas.
Srinivas was the PCC president between 2003 and 2004 when the late Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy led the party back into power and also contributed to its strength in the Lok Sabha in 2004 and 2009, making sure that the UPA came into being. In 2019, Aravind parachuted into the BJP.
By the time the levels of resentment among the public against the K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) family had peaked and Congress was still busy regrouping its energies. Foreseeing the unavoidable loss, analysts say that Madhu Yashki, then Congress candidate from Nizamabad decided to transfer his vote share to BJP so that they could “teach a lesson” to KCR by defeating his daughter. This and a few other factors came in handy for the BJP in 2019 but that’s no longer the case in 2024. The BJP’s candidate against Owaisi this time though has joined hands with Prime Minister Modi in further bringing down the standard of the election campaign.
Coming to BRS, its supremo, KCR, is on the road after a decade to make sure that the rank and file of his party galvanise behind him. It, however, is short of its full campaigning team and senior party leader T. Harish Rao has not been seen much in public meetings since the initial days.
BRS is also having to tackle suspicions over what is being seen as underhand dealing with the BJP for the sake of his daughter who is now in prison. In the last assembly elections, BRS snatched Hyderabad from the Congress which added to its strength in the assembly but unfortunately, the city, including its outer sphere, has only four seats. Of those four, one rests with the BJP, one with the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMM) and one with Congress, leaving only one for BRS. Irrespective of its limited chances, the BRS chief is using this campaign to make sure that his cadre doesn’t desert him. In the northern Telangana region, the BRS is seen as playing spoilsport paving way for the BJP’s victory. To save himself from this criticism, KCR is urging voters to give good number of seats in Telangana so that he can play a role in national politics. The situation has also forced him to tell the voters that the BJP is not forming a government in Delhi after June 4 and hence there is scope for him to play a role keeping his experience in being with coalitions in Delhi from time to time.
Transfer of votes is a question in AP among the alliance partners
This year will be seen as a defining moment in the electoral history of Andhra Pradesh.
The state is witnessing a bipolar contest between the ruling Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) and BJP-TDP-Janasena alliance pitched against it. After dilly-dallying for long, the Congress handed over the reins to YS Sharmila who is leading the campaign for Congress from the front after having a seat sharing primarily with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). Sharmila is joined by her cousin Suneetha Reddy who is campaigning against Jagan. A strong personal tone has enhanced the edge in the campaign she has led in the light of her father Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy’s murder and suspicious happenings in the case, as per her allegations.
In a neck-to-neck fight for retaining power, YSRCP is banking on the reach of its welfare programmes and the caste combination it feels it has been able to push in each seat. In 2019, a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) survey had revealed that among the upper castes, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) got 57% of the votes while the YSRCP could only garner 29%. YSRCP managed a good showing among Dalits and was able to split Muslim and Backward Classes (BC) vote banks from the TDP to forge its way to power in the 2019 assembly elections. The prospects of the TDP alliance depends on how Muslims vote this time.
In 2019, Muslim voters were split vertically between TDP and YSRCP whereas this time TDP’s alliance with BJP is making it difficult to cut much ice with the minority vote. Given all indications, YSRCP, though referred to as the BJP’s B team, is going to take a lion’s share of the minority vote. It is expected that this will improve YSRCP’s prospects greatly, both in Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
On the ground, the strong TDP mass base is looking at Jana Sena led by Pavan Kalyan with suspicion based on the way he coerced the TDP into an ‘unwilling alliance with the BJP.’ This is making it difficult for the TDP leadership to convince their rank and file to transfer their vote base to respective contestants from BJP and Jana Sena. The senior TDP leadership is under the impression that in the event the alliance fails to pull off a win, BJP is eyeing a capture of the opposition space like what it had done with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) rank and file in Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, YSRCP is facing considerable anti-incumbency in Guntur, Krishna and West Godavari districts. These are districts which house major landowning classes in the state which have benefited from the TDP between 2014 – 2019.
In a surprising contrast, the BJP, which is upping the ante against the Revanth Reddy government for its supposed non-implementation of several key promises, could not come up with similar questions against the YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh. Despite their best efforts, the TDP-BJP-Jana Sena trio could not put any pressure on YSCRP by even keeping the focus on the state capital issue. It is also believed that in support of the TDP, a large number of well-resourced NRI’s are touring the state. Many of them, say analysts, could be those who would have invested in real estate in Amaravathi under TDP regime.
Both states poll for 42 MPs together on May 13, Monday, along with Andhra Pradesh set to choose a new assembly with 175 members.