In a statement that would hurt K Chandrasekhar Rao, the TRS patriarch and the CM of Telangana, and the delight BJP, AIMIM Chief Asaduddin Owaisi said that his party would not go in alliance with TRS for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation polls.
“We have no alliance with the TRS for this election. In fact, the TRS, too, is contesting on many seats from where we are contesting. Definitely, there will be a battle with TRS in these elections,” Owaisi said.
A triangular contest in any region of the country where BJP is a player helps the saffron party lead because the opposition vote bank gets divided while its core vote bank remains faithful. Therefore, AIMIM going separately would ensure that BJP’s victory in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections as opposition votes would be divided among AIMIM, TRS, and Congress – which now is reduced to a marginal player, nevertheless, it would cut votes.
Presently TRS is the ruling party of GHMC with 99 seats out of 150 followed by AIMIM which has 44 seats. BJP, a resurgent force in Telangana, is being helped by Telugu superstar Pawan Kalyan who agreed to campaign for BJP in the GHMC polls. “Election results in Bihar and Dubbak show that everywhere, in every corner of the country, they want the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I hope Hyderabad emerges as a developed world city under the leadership of the Prime Minister,” Mr Kalyan said.
“With all my heart I hope that a BJP candidate becomes Mayor of Hyderabad,” he added.
Kalyan is the President of Jana Sena party, which was founded by him in 2014 to fight for the rights of the common people. Being a very popular figure in the Telugu film industry, he is known to have raised the issue of looting Hindu temples under the regime of Jagan Mohan Reddy and has an ideology similar to that of the saffron party.
Read More: With Pawan Kalyan, BJP is all set to defeat Owaisi in his bastion
It was only a few days ago that Karthika Reddy, the former mayor of GHMC and a senior Congress leader, joined BJP. Congress, which used to be a major political force in the state till 2014 and the single largest party in GHMC after the elections of 2009, was reduced to only two seats- less than BJP which won four seats in the 2016 GHMC election.
BJP bagged the second-highest number of seats in the Greater Hyderabad region in the 2019 general elections along with winning the Secunderabad seat. Besides, BJP also won three more seats and emerged as the second-largest party of the state, winning four seats out of 17. Moreover, the party even won the Dubbak assembly by-polls.
TRS is eying for Hindu votes as the majority of Muslim votes will definitely go to Owaisi’s AIMIM and BJP plans to replace TRS as the party of Hindus because KCR’s ‘secular’ credentials are a matter of public knowledge. The Hindus, who are regularly being oppressed by AIMIM’s party workers in the state, would definitely prefer BJP over TRS and therefore the saffron party is all set to triumph in the upcoming GHMC polls.
The GHMC polls will be held on December 1 and the counting is supposed to take place on December 4. With Congress being a spent force in the state of Telangana as well as in Hyderabad, the major opposition to the saffron party would come from TRS and AIMIM. While TRS is already in alliance with AIMIM in the assembly, both parties will be fighting the GHMC polls separately.