Telangana CM’S fresh gambit to enter national politics

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao is at it again. He wants to float a fresh national platform of Opposition forces. A similar trial balloon he flew ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 was easily pricked by the BJP, which romped home with a brute majority.

Once bitten but not shy, KCR wants to repeat the experiment by inviting all anti-BJP leaders, including Mamata Banerjee, MK Stalin, Akhilesh Yadav and H D Kumaraswamy, to Hyderabad for a conclave in the second week of December. There is one difference though. While in the first outing he tried to create a non-BJP, non-Congress alternative, he now wants it to be an anti-BJP grouping alone.

It indicates his rather reluctant acknowledgement of the rise of the BJP at the expense of the Congress in Telangana. Though the timing of his announcement may appear strange as general elections are four years away, KCR is already facing the stiff challenge of steering his TRS to victory in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls. He also appears to have subtly unwrapped his national ambitions, indicating he wants to pass on the baton in the state to his son K T Rama Rao at some point in time and move on to a bigger power play.

Of course, there is enough space at the national level for a force that can challenge the dominance of the BJP, as the Congress lacks inspiring leadership and its resurrection appears distant. A consolidation of Opposition forces could surely help change the narrative, but the question is whether the bunching of regional parties alone would do the trick. For, many of the regional parties are powerful in their respective states, but taken together, they constitute a chain with weak links.

That a chain is only as strong as its weakest link is well known. Now imagine the fate of a chain that has loads of weak links. History has shown how short-lived such experiments can be, particularly in the absence of an accepted leader of the front. KCR, nonetheless, is keen on changing the trend. What helps the BJP is the bloated egos of the regional satraps, who let Modi win even before the battle has begun.