Telangana – Gujarat of South – to vote amid BJP’s caste push against KCR
Telangana KCR rally
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, November 29: Since the state was carved out from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana has been the third fastest growing state in India. During 2014 to 2023, the size of the economy of Telangana trebled with Hyderabad being the ‘cash cow’ of the state, growing rapidly because of growth in the IT and pharma sectors.
Incumbent Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao is seeking third straight mandate as the people in Telangana will vote tomorrow in a single phase election to elected members for 119 Assembly seats. Known to be a maverick in the Indian politics, KCR has defied all odds to dominate the politics of Telangana – first by leading the campaign for the creation of the state and afterwards to stitch a bouquet of welfare schemes by dipping his hand in the state’s coffer richly replenished by the gains of Hyderabad in the last two decades.
The BJP, drawing confidence from the party’s gains in the Hyderabad municipal elections last year, is posing a challenge to the unbroken stints of KCR in Telangana. The BJP is banking on a social engineering to rally the backward castes against the perception that the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) is dominated by the upper castes.
The Congress is counting on the anti-incumbency votes against KCR-led BRS and the old workers’ base to make a comeback in the state politics. While former Congress president Sonia Gandhi is widely known to have acquiesced to the pleas of KCR for the creation of Telangana, which had seen dramatic scenes in the Lok Sabha after the state reorganisation bill was moved by the then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, she issued a video message to the people ahead of the polling.
KCR is counting on the strength of the organisation of the BRS in Telangana to counter the challenge of the BJP and the Congress. His son and the state IT Minister K. T. Rama Rao, popularly called KTR, is fully in the saddles of the party affairs.
While the state GDP of Telangana was Rs 5.05 lakh crores in 2013-14, the size has almost trebled to Rs 13.27 lakh crores in 2022-23. The per capita income of Telangana has also seen sharp rise, from Rs 2,25,687 crores in 2020-21 to Rs 3,08,732 crores. Even the vision note to make Karnataka a one trillion dollar economy brought out by the former state chief minister Basavraj Bommai had sought to replicate the Telangana model to attract industries in the state.
With KTR calling shots in the running of affairs of Telangana, the state has pulled several of the industries from the neighbouring states by offering packages of incentives. The rapid gains on the economic front enabled the KCR government to nurse his electoral constituency with a number of welfare schemes, including Rythu Bandhu.
The state-based political observers claim that the welfare planks of the BJP and the Congress are not playing out smartly against KCR, and the two Opposition parties may end up also splitting the anti-incumbency votes.
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