In Telangana, bleak future ahead of Congress after Dubbak by-poll debacle

The Congress ended up in the poor third position in Dubbak by-polls, despite pulling out all stops to win the seat and regain lost glory. Party candidate Cheruku Srinivas Reddy, whose father represented the constituency twice in the past, got just 22,000-odd votes and failed to retain his deposit.

A bleak future lies ahead of the Congress in Telangana following the humiliating defeat in the latest by-elections to the Dubbak assembly seat in Siddipet district, which clearly exposed the chinks the party’s armour.

The Congress ended up in the poor third position in Dubbak by-polls, despite pulling out all stops to win the seat and regain lost glory. Party candidate Cheruku Srinivas Reddy, whose father represented the constituency twice in the past, got just 22,000-odd votes and failed to retain his deposit.

This is despite a massive campaign taken up by several stalwarts including All India Congress Committee in-charge of Telangana Manickam Tagore, PCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy, working presidents J Kusuma Kumar, Ponnam Prabhakar and A Revanth Reddy and a host of other senior leaders.

The grand old party, which has credited itself with granting statehood to Telangana state in 2014, has never recovered after it conceded ground to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi. What is worse, majority of the Congress MLAs defected to the ruling party after its debacles in 2014 and 2018 elections.

In 2014, the Congress had won 21 out of 119 assembly seats in the state, but nine of them defected to the TRS. In December 2018 elections, the Congress strength came down to 19 seats, but 13 of its MLAs jumped into the TRS en masse, thereby stripping the party of leader of opposition status.

And in the last six years, the Congress has only been on the losing side in all the by-elections. In November 2019, too, PCC chief’s wife N Padmavathi lost the by-elections to Huzurnagar assembly seat in Nalgonda to Telangana Rashtra Samithi candidate S Saidi Reddy with a huge margin of 43,000 votes.

With the Congress party’s attempts to salvage some prestige by winning Dubbak by-polls backfiring, the party leaders as usual started the blame game, instead of making an introspection of what had gone wrong with the party.

“It was a mistake to choose Srinivas Reddy, a last-minute defector from the TRS, as our party candidate in Dubbak. The party ticket should have been given to a candidate from weaker sections,” argued veteran Congress leader and former MP V Hanumantha Rao.

“The BJP’s campaign that Reddy, too, would return to the TRS fold after winning the seat, like other Congress MLAs in the past, had also damaged the Congress prospects,” he said.

PCC election coordination committee convenor G Niranjan said the TRS had strategically played down the Congress candidate by projecting BJP candidate M Raghunandan Rao as a potential threat by indulging in police searches on him and his associates.

“The TRS sought to impress upon the people that the Congress is nowhere in the field and the fight was between the TRS and BJP only,” Niranjan said.

The defeat in Dubbak once again triggered the demand for resignation of Uttam Kumar Reddy as the PCC chief. Within a couple of hours of the by-poll result, agitated Congress workers at Madikonda in Warangal district burnt the PCC chief’s effigy and demanded that the party reins be handed over to younger leader like A Revanth Reddy, who defected from TDP to the Congress two years ago.

On Thursday, too, when the party leaders held a rally in Khammam in support of farmers, there were demands that Revanth be made the PCC chief. However, Hanumanth Rao demanded that the PCC post should be given to weaker sections who had been loyal to the party for decades and not for defectors from other parties.

The debacle at Dubbak is expected to witness exodus of more leaders from the Congress into either the TRS or the BJP, as there are hardly any signs of any improvement in the party’s prospects. Popular actor and former MP M Vijayashanti already hinted at quitting the party and she is expected to fly to New Delhi to formally join the BJP next week.

“Unless the party high command stems the rot, it doesn’t take much time for the party to disappear as has happened in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,” a senior party leader, who did not wish to be quoted, said.