BJP's south push

Telangana will be the next big test

At least since its victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has worked to spread its reach and break the popular image of being a “north Indian” party. While the party has been fairly successful in the Northeast, it is now focusing on southern India. The nomination to the Rajya Sabha of people from four different southern states clearly underscores its ambitions. The Assembly elections are due in Karnataka in about 10 months, and in Telangana — where the BJP held its recent meeting of the party’s national executive — before the end of 2023. The elections to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly will be held along with Lok Sabha polls in the summer of 2024. Kerala and Tamil Nadu held their state elections last year. In the nomination of the script-writer of blockbuster Telugu films and a revered seer in Karnataka, and in an issue being made of changing Hyderabad’s name, the political messaging is clear — the party wants to spread out south of the Vindhyas.

The BJP is already in power in Karnataka, courtesy the cross-over by a critical number of legislators in 2019, thus giving the party a narrow majority in the House. Such splitting of rival parties has been a standard playbook. That is how it came to power most recently in Maharashtra, and in Madhya Pradesh in 2020. The ploy nearly worked in Rajasthan too. In West Bengal and Punjab, splits in rival parties were supported before the state elections, but the party fared poorly in both. Much earlier, the strategy worked in Assam in 2016 after Himanta Biswa Sarma had crossed over. Indeed, it is arguable that without such defections the party would not have been as comfortably placed as it is for assuring its candidate of victory in this month’s election of the country’s next president.

As for Telangana, it remains to be seen if K Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which has an overwhelming majority in the state, is able to retain support. As is typical in the regional parties, the TRS also suffers from the dominance of a single family. The chief minister’s nephew is finance minister, his son is also a Cabinet minister, and his daughter was a member of Parliament before moving to the state legislative council. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a particular issue of such one-family dominance during his visit to the state in May, terming dynastic parties a threat to the country and to democracy. While similar criticisms had been aired in the 2018 state elections, to no apparent effect, it is possible that some party leaders may want to look for options, which could boost the BJP’s chances.

It is normal in such family-dominated parties that ambitious leaders do not find enough space to grow after a while and look for alternatives. Since the Assembly elections are more than a year away, the BJP has time to prepare. The BJP polled just about 7.1 per cent of the vote in the 2018 Assembly elections, but its vote share went over 19 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. The Congress, the second-largest party in the state, may also see its support shift, which might benefit the BJP. The party clearly intends to increase its pan-Indian dominance and its ambition will now be tested in Telangana.