Hyderabad: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won eight Assembly constituencies against the lone MLA candidate in the 2018 Assembly elections that was further boosted by two seats in the byelections. Despite that, the party office wore a forlorn look with no senior leader present.
The BJP received 13.9 per cent of the vote and stood a distant third behind the Congress with 39.38 per cent votes and the BRS 37.37 per cent.
Senior party leaders like Dharmapuri Arvind, Bandi Sanjay and Soyam Bapu Rao who are MPs from the north Telangana, which is considered its stronghold, lost their bid to enter the Assembly.
The party also lost from Amberpet, which forms a part of BJP state president G. Kishan Reddy’s Secunderabad Lok Sabha constituency. He also represented the constituency, having won from Amberpet in 2009 and 2014.
As a saving grace, the party made good gains by winning four seats — Nirmal, Sirpur, Adilabad and Mudhole — in the erstwhile Adilabad district. It also won the Armoor and Nizamabad Urban constituencies. The last minute announcement of the turmeric board in Nizamabad failed to help Aravind, who contested from Korutla.
The promise of the Chief Minister’s post to a candidate from the Backward Classes communities and to speed up categorisation of reservations for SC communities failed to catapult any of its candidates from the 19 reserved constituencies to victory.
The party had looked poised to making gains in 2020 after winning the Huzurabad and Dubbak bypolls and securing 48 of the 150 wards in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the party, which won the lone seat of Goshamahal Assembly seat in 2018 with 6.98 per cent votes, secured four MP seats in Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Adilabad and Secunderabad parliamentary constituencies with 19 per cent votes piggybacking on the BJP nation-wide sweep the party made decimating the Congress.
The party graph looked down after allegations that the BRS and the BJP were in a secret alliance and began to stick to it in the backdrop of the Centre’s alleged inaction against Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao’s daughter Kavitha in the liquor scam case.
Added to this despite allegations levelled against the BRS by the BJP top brass of using Kaleshwaram as an ATM, no action was taken after giving all clearances for the project from the central bodies like the Central Water Commission and the environmental clearances.
