From 9 seats in 2019 to 0 in 2024, BRS loses Telangana

Hyderabad: The BRS, which had nine members in the outgoing Lok Sabha, was routed in the general elections, getting crushed into nothingness in a heavyweight battle between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC). The BRS came second in just two seats – Khammam and Mahbubabad – and had to settle for the third place in 14 others, and a fourth place finish in Hyderabad.

And for the first time in two decades, the BRS, which began as the TRS and first entered the Lok Sabha in 2001, will have no representation in the new House of People in the Indian Parliament.

While the rout of the BRS was expected, and comes as a huge blow for Rao, his party getting thrashed in Medak constituency is the one that will fester him and his party the most. The BRS put everything it had into this constituency given the fact that Rao’s Gajwel Assembly seat is part of Medak LS constituency, as is senior BRS leader T. Harish Rao’s Siddipet Assembly segment.

In the 2023 Assembly elections, the BRS won six of the seven Assembly segments in Medak and hoped that if it failed everywhere else, it still stood a chance in Medak. But this was not to be with its candidate, a former district collector, party MLC P. Venkatram Reddy coming third.

Though the BRS leaders repeatedly implored that people of Telangana need “BRS as the voice of Telangana in the Lok Sabha,” the verdict clearly showed that voters as a whole did not care, and did not buy that argument, and instead chose to throttle the party.

It was clear from the start of the day that the BRS was going down in a spectacular fashion, with the only flickers of hope coming from Medak during the initial rounds of counting of votes with minor leads swinging the BRS way a few times but as the day progressed, it became clear that the projected ‘one or none’ for the BRS, was going to end as ‘none’.

The BRS, which knew it had a tough task on hand in the Lok Sabha elections from day one, did try to contend with the challenge of taking on two national parties, and its campaign which lambasted the Congress at the state-level picking on some real and several imaginary problems faced by the people, and the BJP as a villain who never cared about Telangana, failed to convince the people that it could be their choice.

Such was the state of affairs in the BRS that the party found it hard to find candidates to contest in the Lok Sabha polls and had to ‘convince’ some to do so, while the top leadership from the Chandrashekar Rao family, for the first time, stayed away from contesting the elections, possibly reading the writing on the wall much ahead.

In the end, the BRS, which began as Telangana Rashtra Samithi, and morphed into Bharat Rashtra Samithi with Rao making his national ambitions clear during the name change, has found itself reduced to a regional party, which it is in reality.