The BJP gets a booster shot of a win in the city’s municipal polls and is looking to get Telangana in 2023

Whatever the numbers are and whatever be the criticism about its undue hyping up of the Hyderabad municipal elections as a national prestige fight, the fact is the BJP has proved its point. That it can grow roots and sprout green shoots in a hostile terrain with a mathematical formula regardless of its status as a Central party or its cultural divergence. And that it can do without its one-time federal partner as a prop. Yes, the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) may be the largest party yet in the Corporation but crashing from 99 seats and losing over 40 per cent of the seats has a sharper sting than defeat. And by nudging the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) off its comfortable perch despite the consolidated vote of a Muslim-dominated city, the BJP showed that its counter-polarisation can work anywhere in India, enough to separate strands of a blended culture in Nizami Hyderabad. Finally, by gobbling up the entire Opposition space, vacated by the lacklustre Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Congress, and winning almost over ten times the seats it had last time, it has undoubtedly emerged as the challenger to the TRS. And by 2023, it hopes to supplant the regional party, riding the anti-incumbency wave, and acquire a southern State beyond Karnataka. It can use Hyderabad as a toehold to pry the door open. Significantly, the city’s municipal limits include as many as 24 Assembly constituencies and touch upon parts of Lok Sabha seats, so no time would be better than now to lay the foundational bricks. And by treating the civic polls with as much seriousness as it would a general election, the top BJP leadership, which parked itself in the city intensely over a week or so, proved that it was committed to and valued each of its local units. That each State is important in its ultimate dream of “one party, one nation.”  While every political pundit thought that Mission Bengal or defeating Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee would top its agenda in 2021, the BJP’s laboratory culture is at work to reap dividends whenever its matters.  In 2016, the BJP could win just four wards, against the TRS’ 99 and the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM’s 44. Even during the 2019 Lok Sabha election, it won four of the 17 seats. Perhaps the conversion rate between 2014 and 2019, from one to four seats, and its recent bypoll victory in the Dubbaka Assembly seat gave the BJP enough reason to hope and plan ahead. Dubbaka is adjacent to the seat that Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR) won from and the BJP wants to encash the symbolism of it closing in on him. But more than everything else, it is what Hyderabad represents that is up for grabs. First, as a cyber hub, Hyderabad is cosmopolitan and is next only to Bengaluru in the I-T sweepstakes. Seen largely as a north Indian, heartland party that is given to the template of the cowbelt politics of caste, the BJP now wants to be seen as a party of the classes and not just the masses. To that extent, it needs the endorsement of the knowledge economy, echo the “digital citizenry” as it were. Besides, Hyderabad’s largely Muslim character and the Nizami hangover have held out against the BJP’s kind of Hindutva, which is about reviving ancient glory before the “history of the invaders.” After the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya — whose impact is largely confined to North India — it needed an ideological conquest in the south. Hence the call to rename the city as Bhavyanagar, which, according to the BJP’s narrative, was its original name, derived as it was from the Bhagyalaxmi temple. The fact that it is located near the Charminar, a monument that defines Hyderabad, unmistakably harks back to the party’s core temple politics. Most importantly, the BJP wants to get rid of Owaisi, who crafted his political survival by undercutting secular forces, saying that they shortchanged Muslims on real issues, earning him the tag of being a vote-splitter and the BJP’s B-team. Now that his appeal is no longer confined to Hyderabad and is expanding to Maharashtra, Bihar and Bengal, the BJP doesn’t want a counter-polarisation to happen pan-India among Muslim voters, who may look up to him as their true representative and not want to be traded for votebank politics. The BJP now wants to cut Owaisi to size. This is apparent from its leader Tejasvi Surya’s statements calling Owaisi an avatar of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and attributing his Bihar win to his clout in Hyderabad.

Of course, civic issues have been drowned out with the floods that swamped the city this year. The BJP has diverted attention from the encroachment of catchment areas and buffer zones around water bodies that has made the city particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. And its weathervane is all about changing directions of the political current. Will Chief Minister and TRS Chief KCR be able to reclaim his political stock, now that the BJP has become his worst foe, by taking up real issues? There was a time when he could claim advantages by tacitly supporting the BJP, helping it in the passage of crucial Bills in Parliament and staying neutral on controversial issues. But the mammoth Lok Sabha verdict of 2019 means the national party doesn’t really need him as an ally and would rather have its own man in the State. KCR is gradually losing his tradeable ware and now Hyderabad has shown that being a local leader is just not enough to dim brand Modi. So he needs to rebuild himself as a leader who birthed the State, remind people he is its original creator and has led a social rather than a religious movement, championed their rights that no outsider can ever understand. KCR must realise that the BJP still has trouble ousting Trinamool Congress in Bengal or couldn’t dislodge the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi because both have mobilised people’s movements and made it their own, the former on land rights in Singur and the latter on clean governance. So he must avoid falling into the Hindu-Muslim trap set by the BJP and revive the social causes he stood for, something which he has ignored recently. He must rebrand himself as a State leader and not a leader who uses his State to transact his importance at the Centre.