BJP’s stunning success in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Elections have sent warning bells ringing across the opposition political parties in the southern states of the country. The BJP on Friday emerged as the second-largest party, dislodging the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) from half the seats it had held.
While the BJP tally went up from four in 2016 to 48, the TRS numbers went down meteorically from 99 to 55. Moreover, while the AIMIM retained its tally of 44 seats, contesting on 51 seats instead of 60 the last time, the blow of ending up behind BJP will hurt Asaduddin Owaisi and his overly inflated ego, a tad too much. It is imperative to note that Owaisi and his party, which claims to be a secular party, only contested on seats that were predominantly Muslim seats—even in its own backyard.
The fact that BJP had only won 4 seats in the 2016 elections, makes this victory even sweeter and thus this quantum leap is nothing short of astronomical. AIMIM and TRS had tried to run a nasty election campaign where it accused BJP of creating communal divide in Telangana after Yogi Adityanath, during his campaign trail gave his assent to changing the name of Hyderabad to Bhagyanagar. However, the strategy ultimately backfired as both AIMIM and TRS were made to lick their wounds as they grovelled in wincing pain at the prospect of BJP breaching a traditionally non-BJP bastion.
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After Hyderabad, another southern state, viz. Kerala is now set to hold three-phase local body polls from next week for which the election campaign came to a halt yesterday. The ruling LDF party and principal opposition party UDF have also started a similar smear campaign against BJP much alike AIMIM and TRS.
Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan had recently made an announcement to name the second campus of Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology to ‘Shri Guruji Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar National Centre for Complex Disease in Cancer and Viral Infection’. However, as soon as the announcement was made that the Centre had given a freedom fighter his due importance in history books, serial history distortionist, the ‘left’ came up with its vehement refusal to accept the decision.
On Saturday, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had shot a letter to Harsh Vardhan suggesting that the second campus may be named after some eminent Indian scientist of international repute.
Leaders of the ruling LDF and opposition UDF have begun using this issue as a political tool to amass votes to their bank citing that the BJP is giving undue importance to a ‘controversial and communal figure’.
Defending the move of the centre, the Minister of State for External Affairs and Parliamentary Affairs – V Muraleedharan said that M S Gowalikar was a Zoology professor in the University of Benaras and that he has faced the British onslaught and even faced imprisonment under sedition law during the colonial rule. He also pointed out so many institutions are named after communist leaders as well. “What is wrong in naming an institute after a true patriot?” he asked.
Furthermore, the Kerala BJP President K Surendran also played down attempts of the UDF and LDF to sow seeds of communal discord amongst the public. “Both the parties’ know they are going to lose elections. This is their desperate attempt to whip a communal discord,” he said while addressing media in Thiruvananthapuram.
Left has only one home left in the country and that is Kerala and if it wants to not bottle up its existence then it will have to orchestrate a better political campaign than the one it is currently pinning its hopes on to win the elections.