The times are tough for K. Chandrashekar Rao, Bharat Rashtra Samithi chief and former Telangana chief minister.
His daughter, K. Kavitha, is in Tihar Jail in Delhi for her alleged role in the Delhi liquor scam. KCR’s elder brother’s son Tejeshwar Rao is in Cherlapally Central Jail near Hyderabad after being arrested in a land-grabbing case. One of KCR’s favourite bureaucrats, former state intelligence chief Prabhakar Rao, is now the first accused in an illegal phone tapping case. He is believed to be in the US, and a red corner notice has been issued against him. Another accused in this case is Shravan Rao, owner of a Telugu news channel who is said to be close to the BRS. He has also fled the country. KCR’s closest nephew, Rajya Sabha member Santosh Kumar, has been booked for forgery and trespassing.
The Congress government in Telangana has initiated probes in more than half a dozen cases of corruption and irregularities when KCR was chief minister. A judicial investigation is on into the alleged construction-related lapses in the Rs1.47 lakh crore Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project, which KCR had showcased as an engineering marvel. Senior Congress leaders hint that even KCR could face cases in the near future.
KCR himself is recovering from a fall―not the electoral one he had last November, when the BRS lost the polls, but a physical one that happened last December that resulted in a hip fracture. As his party appears to crumble under a sustained campaign by rivals, KCR has been venturing out with the help of a walking stick and making a desperate attempt to win back people’s trust through road shows.
“We are in a tight spot,” said a senior BRS leader who did not wish to be named. “We have been defamed to such an extent that any measure to defend ourselves will be counterproductive.” For now, the BRS is sticking to criticising the Congress on civic issued like water supply and power.
The BRS is battling accusations that it is a party of the corrupt and the lawless. Probe in the phone-tapping case has revealed that when the party was in power, it had handpicked a few officers to illegally eavesdrop on conversations of politicians and their relatives, and celebrities and journalists. The Anti-Corruption Bureau has arrested two veterinary department officials for an alleged fraud of more than Rs250 crore in a case related to a sheep distribution scheme. The ACB has also unearthed a real estate scam in which a senior bureaucrat was found to have illegally amassed assets worth Rs250 crore.
The cases have dented KCR’s image as an icon of the Telangana statehood movement. The BRS, which won just 39 of 119 assembly seats in the 2023 polls, is also anticipating defections. Congress leader Mynampally Hanumanth Rao recently said that 26 BRS legislators were ready to join the Congress. Two legislators, Danam Nagender and Kadiyam Srihari, have already done so; and so have two former Congress leaders who had been with the BRS―Hyderabad Mayor Gadwal Vijayalakshmi and her father, Rajya Sabha member K. Keshava Rao. Rumours abound that more BRS leaders are in talks with Chief Minister Revanth Reddy. The BRS, according to Reddy, will be empty once the Congress “opens the floodgates”.
The BRS camp appears helpless. “It had inducted a lot of MLAs from other parties in the past, so it has lost the moral right [to criticise the Congress],” said political analyst K. Nageshwar. “Nobody seems to be sympathetic towards [the party]. Even though they had 88 of 119 seats in their second term, and their government wasn’t in danger, they took in MLAs and did not let other parties survive.”
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, the BRS had to face the humiliation of its tickets being rejected by more than half the leaders in the party’s original list of candidates. Some of them even threatened to quit if they were forced to contest. In some constituencies, as many as four leaders rejected BRS tickets before a candidate could be found. Apparently, the BRS, which won nine seats in 2019, could well draw a blank this time.
Even other parties have been shunning the BRS. Soon after assembly polls debacle, the BRS tried to strike an alliance with the BJP for the Lok Sabha polls. But the BJP declined. Worse, a few days after KCR met Bahujan Samaj Party’s state president R.S. Praveen Kumar and jointly announced an alliance, the BSP’s national leadership called it off. Kumar later joined the BRS as a face-saving move. He is now the party candidate in Nagarkurnool.
The BRS also seems to have abandoned its national ambitions. In Maharashtra, where the party had launched a unit early last year, leaders have been leaving the party. “When KCR was chief minister, I used to talk to him every day. After he lost the polls, I came to Hyderabad eight times to meet him, but I could not manage a single appointment. Even BRS coordinators in Hyderabad have stopped taking our calls. There was no direction on what to do next,” said Manik Kadam, who recently quit as president of the BRS’s farmer cell in Maharashtra and joined the Nationalist Congress Party.
The BRS is at its weakest structurally as well. Even though he was a leader of the Telugu Desam Party, which has strong foundations and a robust structure, KCR did not focus on building a strong party from the grassroots. Instead, he handed over party work to itinerant leaders and MLAs who had no emotional connection to the Telangana movement.
If the BRS fails to put up a decent show in the Lok Sabha polls, the party could collapse like a pack of cards and its top faces could abandon it. In 2016, the TDP in Telangana merged with the BRS; in 2019, defections had the Congress’s legislature party merging with the BRS. History could well repeat itself in 2024, with the BRS at the receiving end.