For years now, the BJP in Telangana under Bandi Sanjay Kumar has focused on wooing the Other Backward Class (OBC) communities.In one swift move — which has left both Bandi Sanjay and his successor as state president, G Kishan Reddy, uncomfortable — the saffron party has seemingly shifted focus with the changes it has made to its organisational structure.
The entire exercise of revamping the Telangana BJP unit appears to be more to cut the Congress down to size in the state rather than taking the BRS head on.
After capturing power in Karnataka by defeating the BJP, the grand old party is raring to decimate the BJP in other states as the saffron party is its principal rival at the national level, though it is not in power in the state.
Precisely for this reason, the BJP wants to see the last of the Congress, more than the incumbent BRS, in Telangana.
In private, BJP leaders admit that if their party was not going to win the Assembly elections in Telangana, they wanted the BRS to come to power rather than the Congress.
Keeping this objective in mind, the party jettisoned its years-long efforts to win the hearts of the OBCs who are about 57 percent of the population by replacing the incumbent president Bandi Sanjay, an OBC, with Union Minister Kishan Reddy.
The move may have pleased the Reddy community, a dominant caste although their population is only about five percent, as they are annoyed over the rising ambitions of the OBCs for political power in the state.
The Reddys have already been feeling suffocated with a Velama being at the helm in the state, and are pining for the return of “Reddy raj” again in Telangana, which ended with N Kiran Kumar Reddy, the last chief minister of combined Andhra Pradesh.
Against this backdrop, Congress state unit president A Revanth Reddy had said in the past that no one should underestimate Reddys and that for this reason alone, the Kakatiya dynasty had gone into history’s dustbin.
Though he came under fire for promoting one caste, he, however, was successful in sending out a message to his caste people that it was time for them to make every effort to come to power.
Trying to decimate Congress
After the party went down as if pole-axed in Karnataka, its priority was to decimate the Congress so that it would not become a headache by the time Parliament elections arrive next year.
As the Congress is the principal rival of the BJP, its growth, anywhere in the country, is a sight that the saffron party abhors.
Its policy has been to nip the Congress in its bud stage and, in Telangana, the party is beginning to grow green shoots and soon it might bloom as well.
The BJP, after quick calculations, brought in Kishan Reddy as the party’s chief with the hope of cutting into the Reddy votes which have traditionally been with the Congress.
Reddys, the landed gentry of Telangana, though happy with the Rythu Bandhu incentive of ₹10,000 per acre per year, are not comfortable to remain blinded by the “welfarism” of KCR whose “insidious” plan is to keep political power away from them with these “bread crumbs”.
‘Crown of thorns’ for Kishan Reddy
After the announcement appointing Kishan Reddy as the president of Telangana BJP was made, Nizamabad MP Dharmapuri Arvind described him as a lucky hand, although there were reports that Kishan Reddy himself was not very gung ho about the “crown of thorns” placed on his head.
It is because he knows that if the BJP did not win the coming Assembly elections, he would have to take the blame and it might affect his chances of being taken into the Cabinet in Narendra Modi’s third innings after 2024, should the BJP score a hattrick.
As the Congress has become identified with the Reddys, Kishan Reddy’s brief is to split the vote so that the Congress would suffer at the hustings.
Also, another factor that weighed in favour of Kishan Reddy was that since he is basically a Hyderabadi, he might help the party pick up a couple of Assembly seats in the GHMC area.
More significantly, the immediate task for Kishan Reddy is to ensure smooth functioning in the state party unit in the wake of rumblings that saw him replacing Bandi Sanjay as state BJP president.
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