Curtains came down on the more than a month-long high voltage election campaign in the 17 Lok Sabha and 119 Assembly seats in Telangana that are going to polls in the first phase on April 30 as major political parties vied with each other to take credit for separate State.
Barring sporadic incidents of skirmishes between workers of major parties, campaigning for the election, the last in united Andhra Pradesh, has been by and large peaceful. The region, becoming a new State on June 2, is set to witness a triangular fight between the Congress, the TRS and the BJP-TDP alliance.
The Congress, the TRS and the BJP-TDP alliance are all claiming credit for their role in realising the six-decade-long dream of the people and seeking people’s support in putting the 29 State on the path of accelerated development. The prestige attached to the current election can be gauged from the fact that several national leaders including Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and AICC vice-president Rahul Gandhi in addition to senior BJP and Congress leaders participated in the campaigning.
One marked feature of the election has been the manner in which TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao went hammer and tongs against the Congress and the BJP leaderships for their efforts to stall Telangana. The TRS president, during his whirlwind campaign, sought to drive home the point that the TRS alone had the right to take credit for the formation of Telangana as it was the pressure mounted by it that made others follow suit.
The campaigning witnessed intense efforts by the Congress and the BJP leaders to isolate the Telangana party with senior national leaders of the two parties concentrating their efforts on discrediting the TRS. Ms. Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Rahul Gandhi and the Congress leaders tried to impress upon voters against voting for the TRS which lacked credibility, Mr. Modi focussed more on how the ascent of Mr. Rao could give rise to another dynasty rule.
The leaders were one in criticising Mr. Rao for having nothing to offer to common man, but for keeping his personal and family interests in mind. Mr. Rahul Gandhi is a step ahead of others in charging Mr. Rao with "backstabbing" the Congress by going back on his promise of merging his party once the Statehood was granted.
While senior Congress leaders Digvijay Singh, Jairam Ramesh and Ghulam Nabi Azad stayed put to fine-tune the campaign strategies, BJP’s Sushma Swaraj, Ravishankar Prasad and other senior leaders toured the Telangana districts to take the saffron party’s contribution in Telangana formation to the people. Senior leaders were subdued in their criticism of the TRS, but Telugu film actor Pawan Kalyan, campaigning for the TDP-BJP alliance, minced no words against Mr. Rao in Karimnagar and Nalgonda districts.
The TDP and the TRS took to the 3D mode of campaigning, for the first time in the State election history, deploying vehicles equipped with gadgets to beam holographic images of their leaders to all major parts of the region. Though YSR Congress has also fielded candidates in all constituencies, it does not appear to have much presence in the region due to its stand opposing the bifurcation of the State.
The Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, though confined to the Twin Cities, is far ahead of its rivals in the campaigning while the Left parties are struggling hard to retain their strongholds in pockets of Nalgonda and Khammam districts.
