‘BJP’s North centric political strategy of polarisation will not work in South India’

He feels that the main problem has been that BJP leadership did not strategize in accordance with the people’s needs.

Hyderabad: At a time when the BJP leadership is seeing the future of the party in the South has the best possibility in Telangana after Karnataka, several senior party leaders from the State are of the opinion that BJP’s North centric political strategy of polarisation and political belligerence will not work in South India.

For instance, State BJP unit chief spokesperson K Krishna Sagar Rao is of the opinion that BJP’s North centric strategies would not help the party get a stronghold in the Southern States and that there was a need to adopt a different strategy in the South to win over people.

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He feels that the main problem has been that BJP leadership did not strategize in accordance with the people’s needs. In many instances, they copy-pasted the strategies which they had adopted for North India.

In an interview to a popular magazine recently, Krishna Sagar Rao, stated that the party should do away with its core political strategy of polarisation, which helped it in grabbing power in the Hindi heartland, and adopt earlier ideology of the party which does not come across as divisive.

“If I were given an assignment of converting South for us, I would first pick up the earlier ideology of the party, which is grand, which does not come across as divisive. I won’t say divisive, but I would say polarising, with the kind of emotional fervour that can work in other parts of the country,” Krishana Sagar said.

He further stated that going back to the party’s roots and transplanting them in the Southern political arena could reap success for the BJP in the region, if articulated correctly. According to him, politics in the Southern states, leant more towards the subtle, with little space for overt goading.

The BJP has failed to dent South India and it still remains unconquered, as the people have not fallen in their trap of polarisation. In the last general and assembly elections, barring Karnataka, all the other Southern States-Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, voted against the BJP along more visible ideological and political reasons.

Karnataka is one state that the BJP could breach by giving political representation to the Lingayats and communal polarisation. According to Krishna Sagar , BJP could succeed in Karnataka as luckily it had former chief minister BS Yediyurappa, a Lingayat mass leader, who managed to bring the party in power.

Interestingly, though Telangana has the required social character for the BJP to ground its polarised narrative, the BJP was not able to make its strong presence as the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) did not allow its ill-intention to materialise. The BJP could win just one assembly seat in the 2018 elections and four MP seats in 2019.

Similarly, the BJP could not open its account in Andhra Pradesh. However, Krishna Sagar claimed that in 2023, the BJP was planning to win at least 70 assembly seats out of the 119.

“Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah have given us a target of ‘Mission 70’. If we target just urban or semi urban seats we can win. But we are not doing that. So there is a lack of understanding in the strategy being drawn by people who are in leadership positions.” he stated.

The senior BJP leader stated that Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao was not worried about BJP and added that he want to finish Congress in the State as he feared that the latter could rise anytime.