If you drive around Hyderabad, you can’t miss the pink billboards dotting the city. They overlook busy streets and flyovers. Small ones are tied to pillars of metro stations. Each hoarding has three elements —a large photo of K Chandrashekar Rao or KCR in his typical white attire, his party symbol car and a crisp message in Telugu or, occasionally, in English. One message reads: “36 flyovers, underpasses and bridges, let’s make 100 more…. Let’s go from good to great.”
Once you cross the city limits and chat with farmers, shopkeepers, students and youngsters in the countryside, you will realise that it’s no longer a good-to-great story for the 69-year-old chief minister of Telangana, who is seeking a third term and making a bid to outshine the political icons of undivided Andhra Pradesh such as N Chandrababu Naidu and the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR).
Anti-incumbency sentiments and even anger against KCR and his party, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), is palpable across Ranga Reddy, Medak, Kamareddy, Karimnagar, Jagtial and Warangal districts where ET travelled earlier this week. Telangana, which was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, will vote on November 30 to elect 119 MLAs.
THIRD TIME, TOO, LUCKY?
The forthcoming assembly election could turn out to be the toughest test for KCR, the wily politician who outmanoeuvred his opponents in the last two elections, first by rolling the dice in 2014 to not ally with the Congress at the last moment and then gambling once more in 2018 when he stumped his opponents by advancing the polls by six months. In both cases, KCR reaped handsome dividends. In 2014, his party, then called Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), won 63 seats, a decent tally, which it improved to a resounding 88 in 2018. Then KCR decimated his opponents. The party’s nearest rival, Congress, had to be content with just 19 seats.
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Will KCR be able to beat the odds this time around?
“No way,” says L Suryanarayana, an assistant professor of pharma sciences in Warangal’s Kakatiya University. “People are bored with his politics. KCR has not fulfilled several promises. Unemployment is rising. Question papers are getting leaked. And students whom I teach in the university are saying they want change,” he says, adding that Congress is gaining momentum.
“KCR is very adamant. He should go,” says K Ravi, who runs a car battery shop in Karimnagar, a town 170 km northeast of Hyderabad. S Raju, a car mechanic and Ravi’s neighbour, echoes the sentiments but he adds a personal angle to his anger. “My one-acre farmland got registered under my cousin’s name when the government migrated the land records to an online platform. And the man who colluded with my cousin was none other than our village sarpanch, a local BRS strongman,” he alleges, referring to Dharani, a land records management software, which, several opposition leaders have claimed, was designed to help land grabbers. In a rhetorical outburst, Congress leaders have said they will throw Dharani into the Bay of Bengal if the party comes to power. KCR retorted publicly: “Throw out the Congress instead into the Bay of Bengal.”
While anti-incumbency sentiments seem to be strong in many pockets, ET also met several people who are diehard KCR supporters, or even fans, who dismiss criticisms about his inaccessibility and nepotism. His son KT Rama Rao, or KTR, is the party’s working president; his nephew T Harish Rao is the finance minister; and his daughter K Kavitha was first an MP and is now as MLC. Nagalata, a rice farmer at Toopran, a locality that falls in KCR’s constituency Gajwel, is a big supporter of the CM. “All farmers are getting money under various welfare schemes. Our vote is for the car,” she says, referring to the BRS’ election symbol.
Ahead of the 2018 elections, KCR had rolled out Rythu Bandhu, a cash transfer scheme for farmers, which not only wooed rural Telangana but helped galvanise public opinion in his favour. In this round of elections, KCR is devoid of any such brahmastra.
The Congress has emerged as the key challenger mainly due to state party president Revanth Reddy’s aggressive demeanour. He is directly contesting against KCR in Kamareddy. He has also made a slew of promises ranging from free electricity for up to 200 units to 10 gram gold for brides. Yet this election is less of a BRS-Congress battle than one fought between diehard KCR loyalists and those who want to teach him a lesson.
FOR OR AGAINST KCR?
In this pro-KCR versus anti-KCR bout, Congress has emerged as a rallying point for the disgruntled lot. The popularity of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been waning after peaking in 2019 when it won four out of 17 Lok Sabha seats and garnered an impressive 19.65% vote share. Now, a poor performance by BJP will mean the anti-incumbency votes have consolidated around the Congress, not an ideal scenario for the BRS chief.
“In Kamareddy, B J P candidate Venkataramana Reddy is a local person while both KCR and Revanth Reddy don’t belong to this place. I am voting for BJP though I suspect KCR will ultimately win,” says Naveen Kumar, a Kannadiga restaurateur who has settled down in the town.
The BRS chief is contesting from two constituencies—Kamareddy and Gajwel. In Kamareddy and many other places, senior citizens are largely supporting KCR because of his liberal pension schemes while the younger lot seems disillusioned with his policies and politics.
The BRS is still strong in urban areas, including the Greater Hyderabad belt, with a large section of Andhra settlers and migrants from other states supporting the party. The Congress has an upper hand in several rural areas, mainly towards the south, such as Khammam and Nalgonda, an erstwhile communist stronghold. In this election, Congress has allied with CPI by sparing just one seat and promising two MLCs if it comes to power. The CPI(M) is fighting the polls alone after its seat-sharing talks with Congress collapsed earlier this month.
Unless the wind of anti-incumbency turns into a hurricane on the voting day, it’s still too early to write KCR’s political epitaph. That he is fighting from two seats does not necessarily mean he is not safe in one. Fighting from Kamareddy could be a political strategy to influence voters in the constituencies in neighbouring Nizamabad, the district from where his daughter Kavitha had lost the parliamentary election in 2019. There is, however, little doubt that KCR is facing the toughest phase of his political career since he founded TRS in 2001, when Hyderabad politics was dominated by two stalwarts—Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party and YSR of the Congress, with very little space left for a third force to emerge. Yet, KCR timed his steps right, first supporting Manmohan Singh’s government at the Centre and joining his cabinet as a minister (2004-06), before pulling out to be a full-time agitator, intensifying the demand for a separate state of Telangana. Though Naidu remained his bête noire for decades, there were times, for instance in 2009, when both leaders joined hands for pure political convenience.
Today, at the national level, KCR seems to be isolated, forcing him to stay equidistant from BJP and Congress-led coalition INDIA. In his home state, his party, which is contesting in all 119 seats, reportedly has an unwritten pact with Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, which will likely retain all seven Muslim-dominated seats of Hyderabad. Analysts as well as people on the streets of Hyderabad agree that the seven seats are “reserved” for AIMIM.
Owaisi is fielding candidates in two more seats. One is in Jubilee Hills where Congress has fielded former cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin. This appears to be a BRSAIMIM ploy to cut into Muslim votes. Though Muslim population in the state is about 12.5% (2011 census), they are mostly concentrated in the old city of Hyderabad from where AIMIM comfortably wins seven seats in assembly polls and one seat in Lok Sabha elections.
This undercover understanding may help the astute KCR on December 3 when results come out. For Congress, the magic number remains 60. For KCR, it is only 53.
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