DISASTER HAPPENED IN THIS WAY........................................ Andhra Pradesh made a crucial contribution to the national tally of the Congress and the UPA in the 2004 and 2009 general elections. Of the 42 seats in the State, the Congress on its own won 29 and 33 seats respectively in 2004 and 2009. The writing is on the wall this time—in the perception of the Congress leadership and independent observers, the ruling party at the Centre and in the State will reach nowhere near these figures in the next general election. An informal assessment doing the rounds in the Congress for the past two months is that the party will get fewer than five of the 42 seats. This is apparently what made the party go ahead with Telangana and stop a further erosion of its prospects in the electorally important region. The Telangana region has 17 Lok Sabha seats and the Congress won 12 of them in 2009. With the announcement of the new State, the party leadership hopes to repeat this performance even if it draws a blank in the rest of Andhra Pradesh. Assembly elections are also due in Andhra Pradesh in April-May 2014 when Telangana will also have its first elections to the State Assembly. A number of senior Congress leaders believe that with the announcement of Telangana the party has clipped the number of anti-Congress seats in the next Lok Sabha. “This, in turn, has lessened the chances of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance coming to power,” said a senior leader from south India. The leader also added that the prospect of the BJP going all out in favour of Telangana in the 2014 election campaign was another factor that led the Congress leadership to make the announcement at this juncture. “The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) would also have played its own kind of identity politics using Telangana and the rest of Andhra Pradesh. The Congress has been able to put an end to all these games now. In the process, the party will gain a majority in Telangana and can hope to win a few seats in Andhra, which is better than the rout we would have faced otherwise,”.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 06:33:46 +0000
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