Hyderabad: In Telangana, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears to be a significant gainer over Congress with the downfall of regional party Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). There was a race between the Congress and the BJP to bag the BRS vote bank. It was keenly watched which party would get the majority of BRS votes.
In the Lok Sabha polls, BRS had seen a drastic decline in its vote share, and the 'pink party' could not even win a single seat. This comes after the BRS debacle in last year's assembly polls. Congress and BJP improved their performances and won eight seats each out of the total of 17 Lok Sabha seats in Telangana.
Compared to the 2019 polls, BRS saw a 24.48 percent drop in its vote share. In the 2019 polls, BRS won nine seats and garnered 41.71 percent of the total polled votes. Whereas in the 2024 polls, BRS could get only 16.68 percent of votes. At the same time, the BJP could improve its vote share by 15.43 percent, from 19.65 percent winning four seats in 2019 to 35.08 percent in the 2024 polls.
Congress could improve its vote share by 10.31 percent. In the 2019 polls, Congress won three seats and could get 29.79 percent of the vote. In the 2024 polls, Congress won five seats and polled around 40.10 percent of the votes. It's clearly visible that the BJP got five percent more of the BRS vote than Congress.
Notably, for the first time since its inception, BRS will not have representation in the Lok Sabha. The party's candidates lost deposits in eight constituencies and were pushed to third place in 14 of the total 17 Lok Sabha segments.
Interestingly, of the eight segments where BRS candidates lost deposits, barring Zaheerabad and Hyderabad, the other six segments—Adilabad, Chevella, Mahabubnagar, Malkajgiri, Nizamabad, and Secunderabad—were all won by the BJP.
In the last year's assembly polls, the only saving grace for BRS was urban segments that fall under Chevella, Malkajgiri, and Secunderabad. The majority of the 39 assembly segments it bagged were from these Lok Sabha segments. Losing Medak was also a major embarrassment to BRS.
Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, once represented the Medak Lok Sabha. It has later become a strong bastion of BRS since the party's inception in 2001.
Assembly segments represented by BRS supremo K Chandrashekar Rao and his nephew, another strong man of the party, T Harish Rao, Gajwel, and Siddipet, come under the Medak Lok Sabha segment. In last year's assembly polls, BRS candidates won six out of the seven assembly segments that fall under the Medak Lok Sabha.
In 2014, KCR won the segment with a 3.7 lakh vote majority. Later, he vacated the seat to become the chief minister of Telangana, as he had also won as an MLA from the Gajwel assembly segment.
"The results of the Lok Sabha poll once again reveal the secret understanding between the BJP and BRS. The BRS boss had monetized the party interests for the benefit of the BJP. He tried to transfer the BRS vote bank to the BJP, due to which they won,” said A Revanth Reddy on Wednesday.
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