BRS to contest upcoming Madhya Pradesh polls

NEW DELHI: Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao’s Bharatiya Rashtrya Samithi (BRS) has carefully kept away from joining the united opposition platform led by Congress, and has now ventured into poll-bound Madhya Pradesh. It plans to contest all the assembly seats in the state where it has had no presence at all so far.
After opening BRS party offices across Maharashtra, KCR has had some activists and former legislators join his party’s MP chapter, in Hyderabad. While the move resembles West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress venturing out to try its luck in states like Goa, Tripura and Assam after big victory in West Bengal in 2021, KCR has started his moves into Maharashtra and MP in a year when he faces assembly polls on home turf.
Interestingly, political strategist Prashant Kishor was working with TMC when the party decided to contest in other states and it so happens that his company I-PAC has been hired by the BRS too.
The BRS getting into Madhya Pradesh is a surprise move since the Telangana-based party would be making its first foray into a Hindi-heartland state, where Congress and BJP have been the main contestants. Therefore, if the BRS makes any gains in MP, it would be against the incumbent BJP government in the state and cutting into Congress votes.
KCR said in Hyderabad on Sunday that he will be opening a party office in Bhopal soon. The BRS leaders say that the party will contest all the assembly seats in the state.
How BRS will fare in Madhya Pradesh is yet to be gauged but that the party getting active beyond its home state is essentially to “increase its vote share at the national level”, according to insiders. In the process, if it cuts into the Congress votes, it could be to BJP’s advantage in a state where anti-incumbency for almost four terms have been piling up.
KCR had earlier announced that the BRS would be contesting in Karnataka assembly polls, but eventually did not field contestants in the neighbouring state, saying “there was little time to prepare”, according to BRS sources.