The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), formerly Telangana Rashtra Samithi, is witnessing an unprecedented decline. Going by recent surveys ahead of the November 30 assembly polls in the state, Congress is clearly on the ascendancy while the BRS is losing ground. Even if these surveys turn out modestly right and the BRS footprint declines, we need to look at the reasons closely not only to understand the developments in Telangana but also to make sense of its impact on the general election next year.
Telangana was formed in 2014, coinciding with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre. BRS won the first and second assembly elections held in the new state due to the expansive transactional welfarism it rolled out, regional sentiment, relief from extreme drought conditions due to the digging of ponds, and laying new pipelines for the supply of drinking water. Further, chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR) maintained a fair degree of communal harmony with special funds for the Muslim community, appointing a Muslim leader as deputy chief minister and pitching for 12% reservations for the community.
Also read: Telangana Polls: BRS Has Reason Not To Be Overconfident With Congress Poised To Challenge
KCR brought in the unique Rythu Bandhu scheme for landowning farmers by granting Rs 5,000 per acre twice a year in the form of investment support for agriculture. His government also announced the Dalit Bandhu scheme, which promised Rs 10 lakh to Dalit families to help set up their own business ventures.
The BRS government has also started a Telangana Brahmin Samkshema Parishad to offer educational loans and support to Brahmin students who wish to pursue their higher education abroad. Since Telangana began as a state with a surplus budget in 2014, KCR rightly focused on welfare with an aim to bring about relief to most sections of the state, which faced neglect at the hands of Andhra capitalists in the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh.
Loss of direction in KCR’s second term
However, problems of misgovernance and a loss of direction have marked the second term of chief minister KCR’s tenure (2018-present). Though his government still continues with many of its welfare schemes, there has been a visible change of mood in the state. Known for its social protest movements, Telangana’s demography is dominated by Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims. Together, these groups constitute 85% of the state’s population. It was movements led by each of these groups and their demands that gathered strength to culminate in articulating the demand for a separate state of Telangana.
KCR delivered on transactional welfarism, but also stoically neglected the aspirational demands rooted in the statehood movement such as ‘KG to PG’ free education. He neglected higher education as he was upset over youth being part of many of the social mobilisations in the state. Universities in the state functioned without vice-chancellors for well over three years after the formation of Telangana in 2014. Many of these universities still continue to starve for funds.
Neglect of education has been coupled with the encouragement received by caste-based occupations through funds specifically given towards their modernisation. This presented a rather grim picture for the future of many Dalit-Bahujan castes. The BRS presented subsistence welfare but failed to fulfil aspirational imagination. The decline of BRS marks the shift from subsistence relief provided by patronage politics to aspirational politics based on self-respect and greater social equality.
The narrow and casteist vision of KCR is best represented in his own persona, which is abrasive, arrogant, and non-responsive. He emerged on the political scene as a symbol of protest, but as chief minister, he manifested nothing but contempt for mass mobilisations. He also distanced himself from mass leaders of the statehood movement and got many of them arrested, including Kodandaram, who is now the chief of Telangana Jana Samithi. Recently, a case was framed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against well-known activists, leading to protests from various quarters.
A popular anecdote among civil society activists in the state is that KCR did not meet the famous balladeer Gaddar, who waited for hours for an appointment. It is this arrogance of KCR that culminated in undermining the very regional sentiments that brought him to power. His aspiration to take his party national has also undermined legitimate regional sentiments. This has proved to be suicidal as there has been a loss of emotional connection with regional identity.
BJP’s failed attempts to emerge as an alternative to BRS
It was this space that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) attempted to capture in Telangana. It attempted to communalise regional imagination. This did not work in Telangana, though it continues to have reasonable appeal among caste-Hindu middle classes. The BJP began to grow with great appeal among the OBCs. It then attempted to combine social justice with communal polarisation. Under the leadership of Bandi Sanjay (who is from the OBC Munnuru Kapu community), the BJP expanded its footprint. But Telangana has remained the land of Reddy domination, as Andhra is of the Kammas.
BJP Telangana unit president Bandi Sanjay with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the BJP national executive meeting held on July 4 in Hyderabad. Photo: Twitter.
The central leadership of the BJP has been pursuing the policy of undermining independent leaders in states, following a clue from Indira Gandhi’s brand of politics. They refuse to learn the lesson in a pitch to push for complete dependence on the manufactured charisma of Narendra Modi. They refuse to learn from the debacle in Karnataka after undermining Yeddyurappa’s leadership and staring at a steep challenge in Rajasthan after undermining the leadership of Vasundhara Raje.
The BJP wants to expand but with Modi as its only popular face. Beyond North and West India, Modi is not a leader with great reach in the South and the East. With the appointment of Union minister Kishan Reddy as Telangana BJP unit chief in the place of Bandi Sanjay, the BJP has declined in terms of popular presence. Political pundits who were at one point predicting the possibility of the BJP forming a government give them no more than five seats in the upcoming assembly elections.
Also read: From Pushover to Position of Strength: Congress’s Gain Evident in Public Outcry Against BRS
Revival of Congress
There is a perception among some that the BJP, BRS, and the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) are working in tandem to arrest the rise of the Congress. This has now made it a bipolar contest between Congress and the rest. The Congress has begun to articulate the new demands and regional aspirations in Telangana. The recent announcement that Kodandaram, a key leader of the statehood movement and the Telangana Jana Samithi chief, will work and contest together with the Congress has further helped the party capture the protest space in Telangana.
Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Revanth Reddy, and others during the election campaign in Telangana. Photo: X (Twitter)/@RahulGandhi.
In a replication of the experiment in Karnataka, where more than 100 civil society organisations worked independently but with a desire to keep out the BJP, in Telangana too, over 50 organisations came together under the platform of Telangana Vidhyavanthula Vedika to campaign independently against the misrule of the BRS and the danger posed by the BJP. These organisations have close grassroots connections in various districts.
KCR moved from being the poster boy of Telangana sensibilities and identity to betraying and undermining not only material mobility but psychological and emotional identification. This is akin to the terminal decline of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal, when it turned against the peasants who were its mainstay.
For the moment, the Congress is increasingly occupying this space and filling the void both because of the favourable role it played in the formation of a separate state through Sonal Gandhi’s intervention and with Rahul Gandhi presenting a left-of-centre vision. This shift is happening with scepticism of the possibility of a return to the ‘Reddy landlordism’ that Congress represented in the past in Telangana. If Congress maintains its transformative image, symbolism, and policy frame, it could look at a long haul, otherwise, people will move on to look for other options.
Ajay Gudavarthy is an associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU.
