First Bihar, now Hyderabad: A new political blueprint featuring BJP and AIMIM to disarm regional satraps?

Vibha Sharma
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 5

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The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) may have emerged as the single-largest party in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls but it is the BJP which stole the show as the runner-up in the closely-contested local bodies’ elections.

And while the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) trailed the BJP, it emerged the kingmaker giving a reason to observers to sense a new political blueprint featuring BJP and AIMIM for Muslim-dominated regions to disarm regional satraps.

The BJP election machine managed to turn the local bodies’ election into a national event replete with saffron verbosity and star campaigners, including Home Minister Amit Shah, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath , BJP president JP Nadda and BYJM president Tejasvi Surya, leading from the front in true BJP style with offers ranging from changing the name of Hyderabad to ‘Bhagyanagar’ to  ‘emancipating’ people from ‘Nawabi rule’.

Notably, Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM won an unprecedented five seats in Bihar’s Seemanchal region in recently concluded assembly elections, becoming one of the reasons behind the RJD-led alliance suffering losses and the JD-U-BJP alliance forming the government.

In Hyderabad while AIMIM held to its own, BJP’s gains came from TRS, say the observers wondering if the saffron party could have managed it so well without AIMIM presenting the opposite pole in the highly-polarised GHMC polls

First Dubakka and now GHMC (which covers as many as 24 assembly constituencies) has given the BJP a big boost in Telangana and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh where the party fared rather poorly in the last elections.

A bastion of the KCR family, Dubakka Assembly constituency is adjacent to Gajwel (which is represented by Chief Minister KCR) Sircilla (his son KT Rama Rao’s constituency) and Siddipet (his nephew T Harish Rao’s seat).