No doubt, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) election gave a big jolt to the ruling Telangana Rashtriya Samithi party. Not only in terms of seats, even on voter share it suffered a big blow. The number of seats tumbled from 99 in 2016 to 56, while its vote share crashed 8 percentage points to 36 per cent.

The BJP emerged as the big winner. From a mere four seats with a vote share of about 10.3 per cent in 2016, the BJP’s performance was nothing short of spectacular, bagging 49 seats with a vote share of about 35.5 per cent.

The BJP’s gain is not only at the cost of TRS. It also gobbled up the Telugu Desam Party and weaned away sizeable vote share from the Congress.

So, what was behind the mercurial rise of the BJP? Of course, the credit should go to the national party for making the municipal election a serious one by sending its heavyweights — Amit Shah, Smriti Irani and Yogi Adiyanath — into the campaign field for its “go south” agenda.

But, for giving that space to the BJP, TRS has only itself to blame. After the State was formed in 2014, the party has been systematically decimating opposition parties such as TDP and INC by luring their MLAs and important stalwarts into its fold. In 2016, 10 out of 15 TDP MLAs joined the party and in 2019, even after winning 88 seats in the 119-member Assembly in the December 2018 election, it poached a dozen MLAs from the Congress.

By engineering defections from the Opposition parties, TRS thought it was consolidating its position in the State. However, the vacuum created by the TDP and the Congress has been occupied by an even more powerful BJP.

The BJP, which is running Congress-mukt Bharat campaign, runs the same risk. If not today, by eliminating the Congress completely from the election arena, BJP could run into some other powerful group or individual to occupy the Congress space.

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