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Congress stares at tall task in poll-bound Telangana
In a triangular contest, the Congress has to cross the magic figure of 60 seats in the 119-member state assembly to come to power.
As the Congress party commenced the preparations for the upcoming elections to the Telangana assembly by inviting applications from aspiring candidates Friday onwards, analysts say the party is facing an uphill task to come to power, braving a tough fight with two powerful contenders – the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In a triangular contest, the Congress has to cross the magic figure of 60 seats in the 119-member state assembly to come to power. However, the party leaders themselves admit that they have to work really hard to reach the figure.
A senior Congress leader, seeking anonymity, said a latest study done by Mindshare Analytics, a political consultancy firm headed by Sunil Kanugolu and hired by the party to work out its poll strategies in Telangana, indicated that the Congress could win 41 assembly seats with comfortable margins.
“In another 42 seats, it has to face a tough battle with the BRS and the BJP. In the remaining 36 seats, the party has little scope to win any seats. So, if the Congress can win at least 20 seats in the second category, it can come to power,” the party leader, quoting the Kanugolu team report, said.
The report, he said, was submitted to All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary K C Venugopal when he came to Hyderabad in the first week of August to address a meeting of the PCC political affairs committee (PAC). “The Kanugolu team said it is not impossible to reach the magic figure, if the party leaders put in an extra effort in the coming days,” the Congress leader said.
Venugopal told the PAC leaders that the focus of the party should be on securing a decisive victory, “banking on our collective strength and strategic approach.”
According to G Muralikrishna, an analyst from People’s Pulse, a Hyderabad-based political research group, in the last three decades, the Congress had never won majority seats in the Telangana region, whether it was during the combined Andhra Pradesh period or after the formation of a separate state.
“The highest number of seats the Congress had won in the region was 50 in the 2009 assembly elections, when the Telangana movement was at its peak. So, it never touched the magic future of 60 in the region,” he said.
He pointed out that despite granting statehood to Telangana in 2014, the position of the Congress had turned from bad to worse in the 2014 and 2018 elections. While as many as 51 BRS MLAs got more than 50% of votes in the 2018 elections, only six Congress MLAs could achieve this feat.
Especially in Greater Hyderabad and adjacent Ranga Reddy districts, which account for 24 out of 119 assembly seats in the state, the Congress has no representation. Though it won three assembly seats in 2018 in rural constituencies of Ranga Reddy district – Chevella, Maheshwaram and L B Nagar, all of these three MLAs defected to the BRS within a few months.
Even in the local body elections held in Telangana, the party put up a miserable show. In the 2019 local body elections, the Congress could win only 75 Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituency (ZPTCs) , 1,377 Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituency (MPTCs) and 2,709 gram panchayats. On the other hand, the BRS won 446 ZPTCs, 3556 MPTCs and 7774 gram panchayats; while the BJP stood a poor third with just 8 ZPTCs, 211 MPTCs and 163 gram panchayats, the elections data stated.
In the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections held in December 2020 , too, the Congress put up a miserable show by winning only two corporator seats in the 150-member corporation.
“The main reason for the poor show of the Congress party at the hustings is lack of a credible and strong mass leader, who can match up to the stature of KCR [K Chandrashekar Rao]. That was the reason why the people had voted for the TRS [now known as BRS] in 2014 elections, though it was the Congress who granted statehood to Telangana,” Muralikrishna said.
Another political analyst and author Sriram Karri, however, said in spite all its inherent weaknesses, the Congress still has the chances of coming to power in Telangana. “The question is whether or not the people want to bring the Congress to power in the coming elections; it is whether or not they want to vote the BRS to power for a third successive term. If they don’t want the BRS, the next best option is only the Congress, not the BJP,” Karri said.
He said the upcoming elections in Telangana are going to be a tough and an interesting battle. “Going by the field reports, the young voters are not very happy with the BRS government due to lack of employment opportunities and growing corruption; while the women and middle-aged voters are favouring the BRS because of welfare schemes. If the Congress can attract even a small percentage of the BRS vote bank, it can come to power with a comfortable margin,” Karri said.
