Jal Khambata

NEW DELHI: Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao got the State Assembly dissolved under a strategy he worked out with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah to delink the Assembly polls eight months later along with the Lok Sabha elections and press for them along with the Assembly elections due in four states this year end.

In three strategy sessions of Rao with the Prime Minister in the last two months and umpteen meetings with Amit Shah, a deal has been struck for an electoral alliance of his Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) with the BJP under which the BJP will contest on more seats.

He, however, convinced Modi and Shah to wait for declaring the alliance only after his TRS wins the Assembly elections, according to a BJP leader involved in the negotiations. He advanced the Assembly polls since he believes he would have lost if held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP leader said Rao explained that Telangana has a large number of the Muslim voters who may not be conducive to voting him back to power if he entered into an alliance with the BJP in the Assembly elections. As part of the understanding, the TRS and the BJP will field their own candidates separately and Rao will continue to attack BJP during the poll meetings. Rao will be deciding the BJP candidates who can take on the Congress in the Assembly elections. 

The TRS coming into the fold of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will help the BJP cover up the loss from the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) deserting it on the issue of denial of special status to Andhra Pradesh. Fearing loss of seats in the Hindi belt, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which together send 120 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the BJP is also trying to rope in the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu to compensate any deficit of seats in the Lok Sabha elections.

In the surprise Telangana poll forced as a strategy, the BJP leader said Modi's idea is to weaken the Congress focus on the three BJP-ruled states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh due for the Assembly elections as the Congress has been taken by surprise in Telangana as it made no advance preparations as in the three states. 

The Congress has very strong presence in Telangana and it would have posed a threat to Rao's TRS in the Assembly polls. It was already in talks with Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu, who heads the Telugu Desam Party, to jointly contest the Telangana Assembly poll to oust the TRS from power. 

Congress President Rahul Gandhi is now bound to focus on Telangana as well in the Assembly elections as a Congress victory will help in the Lok Sabha elections in the state, though there are only 17 Lok Sabha seats from Telangana as compared to 65 seats in three Hindi states (Madhya Pradesh 29, Rajasthan 25 and Chhattisgarh 11).

Chandrasekhar Rao going into the Modi camp came as a rude shock to Trinamul Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was even projecting him as the leader of the federal front she wanted to form to take on Modi parallel to the third front in the making under the Congress leadership.

She has been also in talks with Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for his Biju Janata Dal (BJD) to join her proposed federal front. The BJP insiders, however, say Patnaik has already committed to Narendra Modi to align with the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

Muslims constitute 12.7% of population in Telangana and they are in sizeable numbers in at least 30 Assembly constituencies.