Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tries to create the narrative that they would be the alternative to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), the Telangana Congress is confident of improving its votes and will remain the major opposition to take on the TRS in the next elections.
Rejecting the argument of BJP leaders that the party had strengthened itself at the cost of the Congress across the nation and in Telangana as well, Congress leaders say the gains made by the BJP in Parliament elections were at the cost of the TRS only.
Vote shift
Citing the number of votes polled for the party from Assembly elections in 2018 to Parliament elections this year, a senior Congress leader said that all that they lost in the Parliament elections were around four lakh votes while the TRS votes were reduced by nearly 20 lakhs. All the votes gained by the BJP were from TRS and not Congress, which they feel was still strong at the grass root level. The BJP secured 14,50,456 votes in the Assembly elections with just 7.1% of the total vote share. However, the number increased to 36,26,173 votes in Parliament with the vote share seeing a huge surge to 19.45%.
At the same time TRS secured 76,96,848 votes in the Parliament elections (41.29%) compared to 97,00,749 votes (46.9%) in the Assembly elections. Congress on the other hand secured 58,83,111 votes (28.4%) in the Assembly elections and 54,96,686 (29.48%) in the Parliament elections, as per the Election Commission of India (ECI) website.
The loss of TRS votes is around 20.04 lakh votes while Congress lost 3.86 lakh votes compared to votes secured by their party candidates in the Assembly elections. At the same time BJP gained by 21.75 lakh votes in the Parliament elections.
Minority voters
“This clearly shows who was losing to BJP. Not Congress but the TRS,” said TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy in a recent chat with media men. Congress also believes that the minority voters would back them in the next elections as they have realised that voting for the TRS has only helped the BJP. The constant support of the TRS to the BJP government has also exposed the ‘nexus’ between both the parties, he said.