Sooner not later on telangana assembly polls

Sooner not later on telangana assembly polls

As a regional party, the TRS sees the benefit in uncoupling Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

What’s good for a national political party may be bad for a regional player. Holding simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assembly may have larger benefits, but there is a perception that it could disadvantage regional parties. One of the reasons why Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao is seriously considering an early election to the Assembly is to avoid having to fight the national parties in a Lok Sabha election at the same time as the Assembly election. His party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, cannot be part of a nationwide Congress-led alliance as the Congress is its main rival in Telangana. While it maintains a good relationship with the Centre, the TRS sees little profit to be had from being a pre-poll partner of the National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Under these circumstances, the party does not have a national platform from which it could campaign meaningfully in the parliamentary election. Mr. Rao’s attempts to stitch together a so-called federal front with the Trinamool Congress and other regional parties were a non-starter. The Trinamool leader and West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, warmed to the idea of a grouping of regional parties, but didn’t share his view on keeping the Congress out of an anti-BJP alliance. For many of the other regional parties, the BJP, and not the Congress, is the principal threat.

Mr. Rao knows that while he seeks a second term as Chief Minister in an Assembly election, he will be without a campaign plank in a Lok Sabha election. At the TRS public rally held after a meeting of the Cabinet on an early election, the running theme of the Telangana Chief Minister was an exhortation to his supporters not to be slaves of the “Delhi parties”. Regionalism assumed the form of an ideology itself. Of course, even if he recommends the dissolution of the Assembly, there is no guarantee that the Election Commission will oblige him and hold the polls along with those of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram by the end of the year. But Mr. Rao is planning to make a clutch of populist announcements and hold a series of public meetings in the weeks ahead to grab the people’s attention. With the BJP ruling out an early election to the Lok Sabha, Mr. Rao certainly has his reasons to want to face the voters sooner rather than later. But the people of Telangana are going to judge him by what he did in the last four years, and not by what he intends to do in the next few weeks. It is not enough to cozy up to the Centre to beat off the challenge from a rejuvenated Congress. In retrospect, timing may be a small matter.