BJP leadership rues its strategic mistakes, campaign shortcomings

HYDERABAD: Some serious strategic mistakes, among other reasons, resulted in the BJP losing its Munugode gambit against the TRS, a quick post-defeat analysis by party leaders has found.

Instead of being a ‘Super Sunday’ that it was hoping for, the day turned into one where it had to cope with a defeat, something that apparently did not come as a great surprise for a few leaders in the party.

While party leaders admitted that it did lose the bragging rights that a victory in Munugode would have given the BJP, they acknowledged that more could have been done to ensure a win.

“There were mistakes, some of which should not have happened,” a senior leader in the party state executive said. There were some systemic failures too, which hit the party quite hard.

One of the biggest mistakes the BJP has found was cancelling party president J.P. Nadda’s public meeting on October 31. This sent the wrong signal to the people and the party workers that the BJP may have thrown in the towel. Even worse, to make up for the meeting’s cancellation, the party promised mandal-level public meetings on November 1, the last day of the campaign, which too fell by the wayside as it chose instead to go on ride-along of sorts with bike rallies and corner meetings.

“These were mistakes that should not have happened,” a party leader said amidst hand-wringing in the BJP’s state leadership, and the constituency’s leadership.

The party had also discovered, quite early into the campaign, that not everyone was seeing eye to eye, the newly minted BJP leaders and cadre in the constituency and those deployed from other parts of the state to add muscle to the campaign.

 “There was just not enough time for those from outside to settle there,” a senior state BJP leader said.

Then there were internal systemic problems, of its own leaders failing to do their job, as was in the case of Choutuppal and Chandur mandals, the areas which the BJP hoped would pull Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy through as it was not expecting to do so well in the rest of the mandals.

“The feedback from these mandal in-charges was that everything was ok, but it was not. We hoped that what we lose in other areas can be covered by the extra support in these mandals, but that did not happen as our people failed to see what was happening on the ground,” the BJP leader told Deccan Chronicle.

The party also said that part of the problem was that it “could not compete with the money and liquor distribution by the TRS,” which definitely affected their voting share.