Amit Shah and other BJP leaders will be in Hyderabad to campaign for the local polls. (Archive)
Highlight
- Polls for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation will be held on December 1
- The choice of the local body will decide the mayor of Hyderabad city
- BJP won only 4 of the city’s 150 districts in the last civic election
Hyderabad:
A local election in Hyderabad has BJP A-listers flying into the city for a campaign that has become less and less about roads and sanitation. BJP Chairman JP Nadda and Interior Minister Amit Shah will visit the city this weekend, a sign that the ruling party’s formidable electoral machine is focused entirely on a set of municipal districts in the main center. IT company of India.
Union Minister Smriti Irani was in Hyderabad today and delivered a press conference. His senior colleague, Prakash Javadekar, had visited him earlier this week to publish a “charge sheet” against Chief Minister K Chandrashekhara Rao and his Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS).
The BJP has also recruited its star activist, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, known for his community comments that recently made headlines during the Bihar campaign.
Voting will take place in 150 municipal constituencies, or districts, at the polls of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) on December 1 and a mayor will be elected for the corporation that has a budget of Rs 5,380 crore this year .
TRS dominated the latest civic polls. This year, Rao or “KCR” faces a BJP determined to prove that his recent unexpected victory in an assembly by election was not a fluke.
A week after the campaign, the themes that have dominated political speeches in Hyderabad are Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Osama bin Laden and Rohingya.
In the past two days, passionate BJP MP Tejasvi Surya has delivered highly controversial speeches calling AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi an “avatar of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.” He also accused the Hyderabad MP of bringing “Rohingya Muslims instead of development” to the city.
Mr. Owaisi responded in a public meeting: “These people need to have some biryani to bring them back to their senses.”
BJP Telangana President and MP Bandi Sanjay Kumar doubled down on Surya’s comments by threatening a “surgical strike to drive out the Rohingya and Pakistanis” in the old neighborhoods of Hyderabad.
The BJP leader also accused TRS and AIMIM of trying to win the civic polls with “illegal votes from Rohingya, Pakistanis and Afghans.”
The Chief Minister’s son, KT Rama Rao, told NDTV: “What do Bin Laden, Babar and Pakistan have to do with the Hyderabad municipal elections?”
In the last municipal elections, the BJP was only able to win four districts. TRS won a comfortable 99 and Asaduddin Owai’s AIMIM won 44. Congress won two districts and TDP one.
Four years later, the BJP’s civic voting campaign is all about planning the Telangana elections in 2023 and the national elections next year.
In the 2018 Telangana assembly polls, the BJP could win just one seat. Last year, in the Lok Sabha elections, the party improved its strike rate by winning four of the 17 seats.
The party’s new obsession with local Hyderabad body polls is linked to its victory by voting in the state’s Dubbaka assembly constituency earlier this month. It was a slim victory by 1,000 votes, but particularly sweet, as the state finance minister Harish Rao ~ CHECK ~, considered TRS’s top polling strategist, was in charge of Dubbaka.
The BJP senses an opportunity in Telangana and a void in the opposition space. Congress has been decimated in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, it was considerably weakened in the 2014 general elections even though it was instrumental in the birth of the state.
Even after last year’s national elections, many Congressional winners went over to TRS.
BJP leaders believe that the Hyderabad municipal elections are the first step they need to challenge the TRS, a party that, curiously, often votes with the BJP-led government in parliament.
In an interview with NDTV, KCR’s daughter, K Kavitha, dismissed any threats to her party from the BJP, saying: “The BJP is constantly in election mode, never in development mode.” His father’s appeal was “unmatched” in Telangana, he added.
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