Route of BRS in Telangana

The Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi (BRS) suffered a humiliating defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. According to the latest trends, all of its candidates are trailing in the 17 seats in the State. The party, which won nine seats in 2019, expected to win at least 1-2 seats, succumbing to the juggernaut of the Congress and a surge of the BJP.

The BJP, which won four seats in the last election, is all set to double its tally to eight this time, by cutting into the BRS vote share. 

BRS President K Chandrashekar Rao and his son and party’s Working President K T Rama Rao made desperate attempts to win back the lost ground. 

“Some exit polls show we might get only a few seats. Another said we might not get any. In either scenario, we will work for the people of Telangana,” BRS Founder-President K Chandrashekar Rao said two days before the counting.

For the 24-year-old party, the defeat was total after the recent debacle in the Assembly elections. Once a darling of the people of Telangana, KCR lost the plot completely after he retained power in 2018. 

He kept all the key leaders at arm’s length. He engineered defections from the Telugu Desam Party and Congress. After winning 88 seats in the 2018 Assembly seats, he emptied the TDP and broke the back of the Congress. Knowing well that the Congress was a cadre-based party, he wanted to decimate it and deliberately ignored mentioning the party. 

He would target the BJP, which was not very strong at the moment, and gave the impression that BJP was his main opponent and Congress didn’t exist. 

While encouraging the paratroopers, he ignored the Telangana loyalists, which angered them. He refused to give appointments to his long-time colleagues in the Telangana movement. He refused to meet them.

KCR became over-ambitious too after retaining power in 2018 and changed the name of the TRS to BRS and said he would become a national alternative to the BJP-led and Congress-led alliances arguments. He failed to notice the simmering anger among the people, particularly among the youth and farmers.. Though the State made some progress in irrigation, agricultural output and in the IT, , a large chunk of the farming community, the people were unhappy with the way KCR kept himself out of bounds from them.

While accepting the defeat, BRS Working President K T Rama Rao said that the party witnessed ups and downs through its 24-year journey. “We were disappointed. But we will rise like a phoenix,” he said.