BJP’s emphatic performance in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections has sent shockwaves in the opposition camp as the party with a seemingly negligible presence in Hyderabad emerged as the principal challenger to the ruling TRS in a matter of few days. Telangana BJP Chief Bandi Sanjay played a key role in ensuring the BJP’s success in Hyderabad, which is yet another testament of the fact that Amit Shah’s attempts are never futile.
As Bandi Sanjay Kumar soon arrives in Delhi to meet PM Modi and apprise him about the overall scenario and how the BJP narrowly lost few wards in the GHMC polls, there is little doubt that Sanjay’s meticulous planning did the trick for the party in Hyderabad.
From securing a paltry 4 wards in the 2016 GHMC polls to now winning a whopping 48 wards, the party’s performance has been nothing short of miraculous. The party greatly benefitted from Sanjay’s no-holds-barred approach as his aggressive campaign against the ruling TRS government and the decision to make ‘Bhagyanagar’ an election issue certainly delivered on the ground.
It was believed that Sanjay’s statements like ‘Surgical Strikes’ on the old city and raking up the issues of illegal migrants and Rohingyas would prove counter-productive, however, seems to have worked well on the ground.
The BJP’s performance in Telangana Lok Sabha elections where it bagged 4 seats out of 17 shocked the TRS with the BJP planning to unseat the TRS when Telangana heads to polls in 2023. G Kishan Reddy was accommodated as the MoS Ministry of Home Affairs and since then, Sanjay and Reddy have worked closely to increase the BJP’s presence in Telangana. The recent by-election win in Dubbaka saw the KCR government prepone the GHMC elections to catch the BJP off-guard and allow the party less time to prepare.
The GHMC elections were slated to take place in February next year however were preponed to this month after the BJP’s stellar performance in Bihar and the victory in the Dubbaka by-election.
However, KCR’s best efforts to ensure a comfortable victory in the GHMC polls didn’t work as Sanjay and Reddy together created just the perfect strategy which also saw a battery of the BJP’s top vote catchers like Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, Tejaswi Surya and Smriti Irani campaign in Hyderabad which created a wave for the BJP in the city. The party also released a charge sheet against the TRS which also seems to have worked as the BJP has gained majorly at the expense of the TRS with Owaisi’s AIMIM holding ground in the old city.
Bandi Sanjay Kumar has a chequered political journey as he lost the Karim Nagar assembly elections in 2014 and 2018; however, his persistence finally prevailed as he won from the Karim Nagar Lok Sabha constituency in 2019.
Before he was appointed the State BJP Chief in March, he was relatively lesser-known with his appointment marking the end of the hold of Hyderabad based leaders in Telangana BJP.
The BJP leadership didn’t hesitate to appoint an ‘outsider’ to lead the GHMC elections as they felt Sanjay has the capabilities to mount a formidable challenge to TRS and AIMIM.
Bandi Sanjay Kumar must be commended to create a winning strategy in such a short time and take on the TRS which had deployed the entire state machinery to hamper the BJP’s poll preparedness. This is yet another example of how Amit Shah never bets on a losing horse as Sanjay has gone on from being a little known leader to BJP’s star man in Telangana.
