Congress considers the challenging challenge in Telangana, which is nearing elections

Analysts say the Congress party is facing an uphill task to come to power, braving a tough fight with two powerful contenders – the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This comes as the Congress party began the preparations for the upcoming elections to the Telangana assembly by inviting applications from aspiring candidates on Friday.

To win a triangular election, the Congress has to gain more than 60 seats in the state assembly’s 119 members. The party leaders themselves acknowledge that they have to put in a lot of effort to attain the number, however.

An anonymous senior Congress activist said that a recent research by Sunil Kanugolu’s political consulting business, Mindshare Analytics, which the party engaged to develop its polling methods in Telangana, showed that the party could win 41 assembly seats with large majorities.

“It must engage in a challenging campaign against the BRS and the BJP in another 42 seats. The party has minimal chance of winning any of the 36 open seats. The party leader used the Kanugolu team report when he suggested that the Congress might take power if it could win at least 20 seats in the second category.

He said that the report was sent to K C Venugopal, general secretary of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), when he visited Hyderabad in the first week of August to speak at a PCC political affairs committee (PAC) meeting. The Kanugolu team said that if the party leaders put in additional work in the next days, it is not impossible to attain the magic amount.

The PAC leaders heard Venugopal tell them that the party should put its efforts into winning handily, “banking on our collective strength and strategic approach.”

In the last three decades, the Congress has never won a majority of seats in the Telangana area, whether it was during the united Andhra Pradesh time or after the establishment of a separate state, claims G Muralikrishna, an analyst from People’s Pulse, a political research organization located in Hyderabad.

“In the 2009 assembly elections, when the Telangana agitation was at its height, the Congress won the most seats in the area with 50. Therefore, it never reached the magical number of 60 in the area, he said.

He emphasized that despite awarding Telangana statehood in 2014, the Congress’s standing in the 2014 and 2018 elections had become worse. In the 2018 elections, 51 BRS MLAs received more than 50% of the vote, while only six Congress MLAs were able to do the same.

Particularly in Greater Hyderabad and neighboring Ranga Reddy districts, which make up 24 of the state’s 119 assembly seats, the Congress is completely unrepresented. Even though it won three assembly seats in rural Ranga Reddy district in 2018—Chevella, Maheshwaram, and L B Nagar—all three of these MLAs switched to the BRS within a short period of time.

The party performed poorly even in the Telangana local body elections. Only 75 Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituencies (ZPTCs), 1,377 Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituencies (MPTCs), and 2,709 gram panchayats were won by the Congress in the 2019 local body elections. The BRS, on the other hand, gained 446 ZPTCs, 3556 MPTCs, and 7774 gram panchayats, according to the election results, while the BJP placed a dismal third with only 8 ZPTCs, 211 MPTCs, and 163 gram panchayats.

The Congress performed dismally in the December 2020 elections for the 150-member Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, gaining only two of the corporator seats.The primary cause of the Congress party’s underwhelming performance at the hustings is the absence of a genuine and powerful mass leader who can compete with KCR’s (K Chandrashekar Rao) prominence. Even though Telangana’s statehood was given by the Congress, it was the reason voters supported the TRS [now known as BRS] in the 2014 elections, according to Muralikrishna.

But according to Sriram Karri, a political analyst and novelist, the Congress still has a possibility of winning the election in Telangana despite all of its inbuilt flaws. “The issue is whether or not the electorate wants to vote the BRS into office for a third consecutive term or if they want to bring the Congress to power in the next elections. The Congress, not the BJP, is their best alternative if they don’t want the BRS, Karri added.

He predicted a difficult and engaging campaign in Telangana’s next elections. According to field reports, the BRS administration is not particularly popular with young voters due to a lack of work possibilities and an increase in corruption, whereas middle-aged and female voters like the BRS due to social programs. The Congress can win with a sizable majority if it can win over even a tiny portion of the BRS vote bank, according to Karri.