T party after 10 years? In state it created, Congress sniffs a chance

NEW DELHI: Ten years after it created the state, Congress is looking at Telangana as a serious prospect for the first time, a long gestation period that shines a light on the party's diminution since the waning months of UPA and Telangana Rashtra Samithi's (now BRS) hold over the breakaway Telugu state.
Riding on the sentiment created by the party's May sweep of neighbouring Karnataka and especially its Hyderabad-Karnataka region, the Congress buzz is rooted in a couple of factors.The victory next door stemmed desertions from the party and triggered a reverse wave, directly impacting BJP. The leadership of Mallikarjun Kharge is seen to have neutralised the Dalit outreach of BSP.
The Congress feedback is that the poll has largely turned into a direct clash, but any above-threshold performance by BJP would help BRS. The party propaganda around "winning" is partly aimed at dissuading voters from siding with BJP.
Having launched early outreach focused on tribals and Dalits, the party will soon announce special promises for minorities and OBCs. The hype over caste census is aimed at wooing the backwards, as per the feedback from internal studies which had raised an alarm over the lack of connect with OBCs and Madiga SCs. The community-specific engagement is undergirded by the "six guarantees" aimed at women, farmers, poor and students, announced last month by Sonia Gandhi at a massive public rally near Hyderabad.
Hope of victory appears a leap of faith for the party that has struggled to match the charisma and networking of the KCR outfit. The party could barely win 19 seats out of 119 in December 2018 polls, and was left with 7 MLAs after a wholescale defection. But Congress leaders say the leap is possible because the goodwill for Congress never disappeared in its stronghold, which is now being resurrected the party's focused campaign and manifesto.
The party hemmed and hawed about creating Telangana during UPA years, and finally bifurcated Andhra Pradesh close to 2014 polls. The untimely death of its strongman CM YS Rajasekhara Reddy, and the party's steady fall in Andhra in view of a rebellious Jaganmohan Reddy, YSR's son, forced Congress to think about cutting its losses. For the party which was looking for an opportune time to create Telangana, it felt that statehood would help Congress win the LS seats in the new state, undercutting the losses in the parent state Andhra. But the party failed to make an impact as KCR, as the author of the statehood movement, swept the polls.