BRS on reboot mode for Lok Sabha polls; 66 preparatory meetings at Assembly segment level completed

HYDERABAD: Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), which has taken a beating in the recent Assembly elections, is gearing up by rebooting itself for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

The party leadership, besides assessing the reasons for its loss in the Assembly, constituency wise, is also understanding the concerns of the local leaders and party cadres who are attending the constituency-level preparatory meetings.

Working president of the party and Sircilla MLA K T Rama Rao (KTR) and senior party leader and former Minister T Harish Rao are personally leading the review meetings.

Also Read: KTR slams Congress for 'chronic betrayal' of public trust

As part of the exercise, the BRS leaders have completed review of as many as 66 Assembly constituencies while imparting the party line among the cadres.

While KTR and Harish Rao have completed 11 constituencies each, former Agriculture Minister S Niranjan Reddy has done nine reviews, and former Energy Minister G Jagadish Reddy has done five.

Other senior leaders have also been tasked with other Assembly constituencies.

The meetings are not only intended at focusing on how effectively the morale of the cadres could be boosted, but also understanding the concerns and recording the reasons for defeat in respective constituencies.

The leaders are making sure that the cadres gird up their loins to fight the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

KTR gave a slogan of “Telangana dalam, Telangana galam and Telangana balam” (Telangana team, Telangana voice and Telangana strength) for the Lok Sabha polls.

The leaders are laying emphasis on the fact that cadres should indoctrinate in the minds of electors how important it is to have a large chunk of BRS MPs in the Lok Sabha to fight the two national parties – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress. This is imperative to highlight the concerns of the State, for the national parties would go by their policies and programmes that may not completely be in tandem with the needs of the people of Telangana.

Harish Rao and KTR, as also the other former ministers, who are conducting the reviews, are not only “training the trainers” on how the messaging should go to the people, but even underscoring the failures of the Revanth Reddy-led Congress Government in Telangana by pursuing diversionary tactics.

The BRS will be highlighting the “fine print” of eligibility criteria in the six-guarantees of the Congress party and the total 420 promises which would naturally obviate the government from fulfilling the obligation of covering a larger section of beneficiaries.

The filters used to ferret out a maximum number of beneficiaries will be explained to people in group meetings and cadre meetings so that people can be informed about how they had lost several schemes that were delivered to them during the BRS rule for a decade.

Though the six guarantees announced by the Congress on the eve of the Assembly elections seemed lofty, the government is tattering the broad pogrammes when it comes to implementation.

For instance, the Mahalakshmi scheme in which the free bus travel for women was implemented. However, overcrowding of the TSRTC buses is throwing up numerous other problems. The other problems surrounding the scheme include lack of space for male passengers, lack of moving space for conductors to issue tickets, lack of confidence among drivers to carry overload of passengers fearing accidents and their obvious consequences.

While on one hand, the RTC is suffering from bleeding coffers, ministers, on the other, are trying to give an impression that revenue of other departments was increasing – like the number of visits to temples by women increased. This was a statement of Transport Minister Ponnam Prabhakar as latest as on Sunday (February 25).

By introducing Praja Palana applications which are the basis for the implementation of the six guarantees as also the other schemes, the government has surreptitiously incorporated several riders.

The leaders are highlighting the issues confronting the implementation of the schemes in the case of many other promises too.

Coming to the Rs. 500 a gas cylinder, which will be implemented from February 27, the Government released a mere Rs. 80 crore and linked the payment to Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) from the oil companies. The State Government would pay the oil companies. How effectively this would be implemented remains a question.

Similar weak links galore in almost every scheme which have yet to take a fool-proof form.

Against this background, the BRS is preparing its cadres to fight the Congress in the State and the BJP at the Centre.

Meanwhile, BRS supremo KCR is working on identifying contestants from various constituencies, factoring the advantages of every candidate in the wake of current political scenario.