Soon after the debacle of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections, analysts have come out with various reasons for the TRS fall and resurgence of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
One reason, which not many media houses predicted, is the largescale anti-incumbency against sitting TRS corporators, who had miserably failed to win over the voters in the last five years.
Apparently, the TRS leadership thought it would have an edge over the BJP and the Congress by calling for early elections within a short notice, since it has readymade candidates in the form of sitting corporators, while the other two parties would struggle in the selection of candidates within three days.
It was true that the BJP and Congress had to face a lot of difficulty in picking up the right candidates to contest the GHMC polls. But the TRS has done a big mistake by renominating majority of the sitting candidates without realising the anti-incumbency against them.
Out of 99 corporators who had won on the TRS ticket in 2016, 72 candidates got the tickets again and only 27 candidates could not get the tickets again because of pressure from other aspirants. Out of these 72 candidates, as many as 35 candidates lost the elections.
Sources said most of these corporators had turned utter corrupt in the last five years and virtually looted the people, let alone doing some developmental activity in their areas. They thought they would buy votes at the time of elections by paying Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000 per vote.
“The voters quietly accepted the money but voted for the BJP. Had the TRS leadership changed at least 60 per cent of the sitting corporators with new faces, it would have won at least another 25 seats,” a TRS leader observed.
