Over confidence and realisation at a much later stage that the opponent wasn’t an easy nut to crack cost the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) in the Dubbak by-poll giving BJP the slight edge to create history.
Internal bickerings went unnoticed till the by-poll was announced after sitting MLA Ramalinga Reddy passed away and rubbing on the wrong side of certain sections by the late MLA contributed to the TRS defeat, the analysis of the local TRS leaders suggest.
Some kind of arrogance seems to have crept in as Mr. Reddy won with a handsome majority of over 60,000 in 2018 and that too for the fourth time. He deliberately encouraged groupism in every village while he also antagonised a section of minority voters over a graveyard issue is the charge of local leaders.
The late announcement of the candidate Sujatamma, who was literally unknown to the voters as against the BJP’s Raghunandan Rao also played spoilsport. She neither could generate sympathy from her husband’s death nor had the time to make up for her poor communication skills. She was always shielded by Finance Minister T. Harish Rao due to the lack of those skills.
The campaign style itself also contributed with Harish Rao asking votes for himself and it gave the BJP a weapon to counter saying why should people vote for him than the candidate? The TRS couldn’t strongly counter this.
This lacunae was noticed in the later part of the campaign but by that time Raghunandan Rao made his way into voters with aggressive posturing on the ‘failures’ of the government in developing Dubbak.
Party leaders said the police high handedness and the way it dealt with the BJP cadre generated a lot of sympathy. And the cash seizure episode at Raghunandan Rao’s relatives in Siddipet turned the focus onto police harassment. “The social media campaign of BJP on the same issue really clicked. Irrespective of the truth, people believed their claims,” a TRS leader involved in the campaign revealed.
Now the party insiders feel campaign by Chief Minister, K. Chandrashekar Rao or the TRS working president, K.T. Rama Rao could have plugged that huge gain of nearly 60,000 by the BJP compared to last elections.
