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Updated: Jul 04, 2019 22:19 IST

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is seeking to consolidate its Lok Sabha gains in Telangana, which it sees as a potential second beachhead in the south after Karnataka.

The BJP won four of the 17 Lok Sabha seats with a 19.45% vote share in the April elections in Telangana, which was carved out as India’s 29th and youngest state in June 2014 after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. Months earlier, in December, it won just one of the 119 Telangana assembly seats with a 7.1% vote share.

“There has been a clear change in the perception of the people of Telangana towards the BJP. They are now seeing the BJP as a potential alternative to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, as they felt there is virtually no difference between the TRS and the Congress,” BJP national general secretary P Muralidhar Rao said.

The TRS, led by chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, led the campaign for a separate state of Telangana and reaped the political dividend in 2014 when he rode to power in the newly created state. The TRS returned to power with an impressive performance in the December assembly elections, but its tally of nine Lok Sabha seats was two fewer than the number it won five years earlier.

The Congress, which was instrumental in granting separate statehood to Telangana, won three seats, conceding the position of the TRS’s principal challenger to the BJP, which is already training its sights on the 2023 assembly polls in the state.

Other than Karnataka, the BJP has made little headway in the south in the past. In the recent Lok Sabha elections, it failed to make a mark in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where it aggressively supported a popular agitation against the entry of women of childbearing age into the Sabarimala temple. It emerged as the single largest party in the Karnataka assembly in elections last year, but its bid for power was stymied by the Congress, which came to office in a coalition with the Janata Dal (Secular). It won 25 of the 27Lok Sabha seats it contested in Karnataka.

Muralidhar Rao said the people of Telanaga had lost faith in the Congress after those (12 out of 18 MLAs) who got elected on the party ticket defected to the TRS. “So, they have realised the Congress cannot be an alternative to the TRS. That is why they are looking up to the BJP,” he said.

State BJP president K Laxman also said the support base of the Congress had been eroding rapidly while the Telugu Desam Party had disappeared from the contest in Telangana. “As such, there is a huge political vacuum in Telangana and the BJP is going to fill up this vacuum,” he said.

Soon after the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP leadership had started focussing on Telangana. Union home minister Amit Shah held a few rounds of discussions with the state BJP leaders in New Delhi on strengthening the party in Telangana.

As part of its strategy, Shah himself will kick-start a membership drive at Shamshabad in the Telangana capital Hyderabad on July 6, when he addresses a rally of the BJP workers. “From the next day, the party leaders at all levels will extensively tour every nook and corner of the state to enrol new members in the party. As of now, the party has 1.8 million members in Telangana and we are planning to enrol another 12 lakh members,” Laxman said.

The party is targeting neutral voters attracted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, besides beneficiaries of various central schemes.

Secondly, the party is planning to adopt the model it did in West Bengal to expand its base. Like in West Bengal, where the BJP managed to fill the void created by the fading fortunes of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and emerged as the main alternative to the Trinamool Congress, it wants to replace the Congress as an alternative to the TRS by luring potential leaders from the Congress and the TDP.

At the same time, the party is planning to take up programmes with a nationalistic tinge. For instance, the BJP is contemplating holding a massive public meeting on September 17 on the occasion of Hyderabad Liberation Day (to mark the anniversary of the Nizam-led Hyderabad state’s merger with Indian Union in 1948). The meeting is likely to be addressed by Amit Shah.