BJP tense over OBCs moving away; plans to woo communities in Telangana

The shift is already visible in Madhya Pradesh, where the OBCs have started moving away from the saffron party

Hyderabad: With Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities holding the potential to impact assembly elections to be held in various States in 2023 and 2024, the BJP leadership is in a spot of bother with these communities slowly moving away from the party. The situation in BJP-ruled States has got the party’s Telangana unit too thinking on how to stem the tide.

The shift is already visible in Madhya Pradesh, where the OBCs have started moving away from the saffron party. The OBC communities, which were supporting the BJP since 2003, for the first time shifted their loyalty towards the Congress in 2018, resulting in the BJP not able to secure a simple majority. It was able to capture power only after engineering a defection in the Congress two years later.

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Since assembly polls are scheduled to take place next year in the State, the BJP leadership is once again looking worried as they cannot afford to lose this time. The OBCs constitute about 48 per cent of MP’s voters and over 100 out of the total 230 assembly seats in the State have a sizable share of OBC votes, which explains Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s desparate efforts to win back the OBCs.

The saffron party did give the leaders of OBC communities much greater representation than other parties in the electoral fray, and won with handsome margins to come to power in the past, but ever since they shifted their loyalty to Congress in 2018, the party leadership is looking uncomfortable as their votes decides the formation of the government in the State.

Besides, the BJP now has a new group to tackle apart from Congress and other political opponents in the form of the OBC Mahasabha, a Madhya Pradesh-based group with a pan-India network. It is believed that this group played a vital role in the 2018 assembly polls in the shift of OBC votes to the Congress from the BJP. In the 2023 polls, the OBC Mahasabha is likely to play a decisive role in deciding the next government.

Even in Gujarat, the OBC were not happy with the ruling BJP as it failed to keep a lot of promises made to these communities, including 10 percent reservation in local body elections. Poll analysts believe that a large number of OBC would vote against the BJP in the ongoing assembly polls in Gujarat.

The situation in BJP-ruled States has prompted the BJP’s State unit in Telangana to sit up and take notice, with Rajya Sabha Member and national president for BJP’s OBC Morcha K Laxman asking party leaders here to launch an outreach programme to attract OBC communities towards the party. Already the party state unit district, mandal and constituency in-charges have been specifically told to target OBC communities while campaigning for the party in rural areas.

However, Telangana BC Commission chairman V Krishna Mohan Rao feels the efforts of the BJP to woo BCs would turn futile as they were with Telangana Rashtra Samithi (now Bharat Rashtra Samithi) from the beginning and would continue to be in future too.

“BCs are happy with the TRS government. They are getting benefits of welfare and development schemes launched by the government. The BCs will always support K Chandrashekhar Rao,” he said.