Telangana: Amid Possibility Of Early Elections, BJP Targets Rapid Growth With 11,000 Street Corner Meetings

Gearing up for the Assembly polls scheduled to be held this year, the BJP in Telangana has launched its election campaign with 11,000 street corner meetings across the state, starting from 10 February.

The mass outreach programme titled ‘Praja Gosa - BJP Bharosa’ (people’s suffering – BJP’s assurance) is aimed at strengthening the party’s leadership at the grassroots level and ‘expose’ the BRS government’s alleged failures.

The campaign kick-started on 10 February and will go on till 25 February. The saffron party has set a target to organise 11,000 street corner meetings in 15 days, BJP vice president in Telangana Kaasam Venkateswarlu, state coordinator for the campaign, told PTI here on Sunday (19 February).

The meetings are being conducted at the level of the party’s ‘shakti kendras’ (that comprise three to four polling booths).

While bolstering local leadership, the campaign will ‘expose’ grassroot-level issues, including corruption by ruling party MLAs, without losing sight of the BRS government’s failures and its ‘family rule’ at the state level.

Besides, the campaign will also highlight the welfare schemes and achievements of the Modi government at the Centre like distribution of free rice, Rs 10,000 loan to street vendors, free COVID-19 vaccines, funds to Gram Panchayats, and recovery of the nation's economy post COVID-19 pandemic.

The party chose to organise 11,000 street-corner meetings as it boasts of over 9,000 ‘shakti kendras’ and 2,000 more meetings have been added to reach out to remote habitations.

As part of the campaign, pamphlets carrying a phone number of the party to give a missed call would be distributed to people.

So far, over 3,000 street corner meetings have been conducted and the party is confident of achieving at least 90 per cent of the target by 25 February.

Telangana’s assembly is scheduled to go to elections in November or December of this year. But many political analysts and leaders are expecting that the Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) may dissolve the assembly and go for early elections at any time.

CM KCR’s early elections plan is intended to preempt the growing popularity of opposition BJP and other parties by not giving them time to mobilise more voters against the government. 

With this expectation of early elections, the opposition parties in Telangana have taken up walkathons and intensified their political activity across the state.

Already, the state BJP chief Bandi Sanjay has completed his walkathon of over 1,000 kilometres in several phases and even attracted the attention of PM Modi during the BJP plenary in Delhi.

Currently, Telangana Congress unit chief Revanth Reddy, YSR Telangana Party chief and sister of Andhra Pradesh CM YS Jagan, YS Sharmila, and BSP Telangana unit chief RS Praveen Kumar are continuing their walkathons (pada yatra) across the state.

BJP also launched ‘Mission-90’ to win 90 out of the total 119 Assembly seats in Telangana.

(With inputs from PTI)