Hyderabad: A high-pitched and intense campaign appears likely on the cards for the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency in the Lok Sabha elections with the BJP on Tuesday making it clear that it will go all out to wrest the seat from the AIMIM.
The Hyderabad seat, since 1989, has an unbreachable bastion of the AIMIM which has won nine straight times. Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi won five straight times from 1989 to 2004, after which his son and AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi has won four times.
On Tuesday, BJP state president G. Kishan Reddy said his party would focus on winning the Hyderabad seat. “Our vote share is growing across the constituency, and the MIM’s share is going down. We are determined to defeat Owaisi this time.”
Kishan Reddy was speaking in Maheshwaram, where he has been meeting with party leaders and people from different sections of society as part of BJP’s Gaon Chalo programme in the run-up to the elections.
Though the BJP appears to have high hopes on Hyerabad, the fact remains that most of the seven Assembly segments that comprise the constituency – Malakpet, Karwan, Goshamahal, Charminar, Chandrayangutta, Yakutpura, Bahadurpura – have been AIMIM strongholds for long.
For much of their history, these Assembly segments, except Goshamahal, elected AIMIM candidates, or before the party formally candidates from that party who contested elections in the 1960s and 1970s as independents.
