Charminar, Hyderabad
By Shankar Raj*
Hyderabad: Despite being on weak ground, Union Home Minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah is keen to see the saffron flag flying in Telangana after the Assembly elections, in December 2023. This seems unlikely to happen and political observers say the BJP should be happy if it gets under a dozen seats. But with Prime Minister Narendra Modi scheduled to carpet bomb Telangana with a string of election rallies, things may change.
Aware of the anti-incumbency winds, an upbeat Congress Party and the BJP’s efforts to expand its base, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) supremo and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) will be heli-hopping and covering close to 80 to 100 assembly constituencies in the next 40 days in a bid to retain power and become the first ‘hat-trick chief minister’ in the south in the November 30 elections. He will be kicking off his campaign from Husnabad constituency on October 15, 2023.
Also read: Telangana: Can the Congress prevent BRS hattrick?
On the same day, KCR will be releasing the BRS manifesto. Finance Minister T Harish Rao said there would be many firsts in the manifesto. “There is only one party in the country, BRS, which has implemented promises made in the poll manifestos in 2014 and 2018 and many schemes that were not listed. The BJP government copied schemes introduced by the Telangana government,” Rao said.
Meanwhile, addressing a public meeting in Adilabad on October 10, 2023, , Shah asked the crowd: “Do you want to bring KCR back to power again? Don’t you want to form a government under the leadership of Modiji? Your cheers tell us that you will form a BJP government under Modiji on December 3.”
Shah’s rally comes a week after Modi addressed two back-to-back meetings in Mahabubnagar and Nizamabad on October 1 and 3, 2023.
“Telangana should be freed from the clutches of the corrupt BRS government and allow the ‘lotus’ to bloom,” he said.
Turning to the present CM, Shah said: “Telangana is number one in violence against women and children and in various scams. BRS, in the last nine years, has never worked for the poor.”
He then added: “The symbol of BRS is ‘car’, but the steering of the car lies in the hands of AIMIM. If you want a government that runs with control of new Razakars, don’t vote for BRS. Their government often makes a false claim that it has made Telangana the number one state in the country.”
Shah further said: “In the past nine years, the PM has given Telangana Rs 9 lakh crore. He recently announced the national turmeric board, national tribal university and tribunal for Krishna river water here.”
Immediately, BRS working president KT Rama Rao called Shah a liar and that Telangana people would not believe his ‘blatant’ lies. BRS party’s steering is in the hands of KCR, and BJP’s steering has gone into the hands of industrialist (Gautam) Adani, he said.
*Shankar Raj is a former Editor of The New Indian Express, Karnataka and Kerala, and writes regularly on current affairs.
