High-pitched campaign for GHMC election comes to end

KT Rama Rao was the face of the TRS campaign in the city with the Chief Minister rounding it off with a massive public meeting at Lal Bahadur Stadium on Saturday.

Hyderabad: The curtains came down on what was arguably the most intense campaign for a municipal corporation election in modern India. The 12-day electioneering that began after the State Election Commission issued the notification for elections to the GHMC on November 17 was a no-holds barred, high-pitched affair that saw the ruling TRS making a strong pitch for development and ‘Hyderabad for all’ against the politics of polarisation unleashed by the BJP.

A major take away from the GHMC election, going by the unprecedented galaxy of national leaders including Union Ministers and Chief Ministers descending on the State capital, is that this may well be a precursor to the saffron party’s design to use all its fire-power in civic bodies’ elections in non-BJP ruled States across the country in future. The party appears to be deploying the inverted pyramid model for consolidation aimed at gaining total control eventually.

The ruling TRS, unfazed by the divisive politics aggressively pushed by the BJP for polarisation of votes, sought to bank on the good work carried out by its government in the past six years, the development it had brought to the city spending about Rs 67,000 crore in the short period, road map for further development and, of course, the popularity of Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao and Municipal Administration and Urban Development Minister K T Rama Rao enjoy among the denizens of Hyderabad.

In fact, Rama Rao was the face of the TRS campaign in the city with the Chief Minister rounding it off with a massive public meeting at Lal Bahadur Stadium on Saturday. The Chief Minister made a forceful speech to protect and save Hyderabad from the divisive forces and to ensure that the unique identity of the capital with all its modern trappings is not consumed by the highly inflammable communal passion that was being spread by the BJP.

BJP State president Bandi Sanjay Kumar brazenly threatened to carry out ‘surgical strikes’ on the old city to rid it of Rohingyas, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who, he alleged, were being courted by Asaduddin Owaisi-led MIM. There were huge moments of embarrassment for the saffron party like in the case of release of their manifesto by former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. It read more like a TRS manifesto not only for the promises the BJP made but also for the pictorial content which was a collage of TRS government’s achievements in various fields.

The outsourced BJP line-up included Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, Fadnavis, Smriti Irani, G Kishan Reddy, Prakash Javadekar and Bhupendra Yadav, all to counter, in the words of Chandrashekhar Rao, a ‘lean man.’

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