Cong improves vote share but let down by its allies

HYDERABAD: The Congress party may have made little headway in prising loose the hold of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) over India’s youngest state, but it did succeed in improving its vote share from 2014.

In 2014, the Congress won 21 seats out of the 119 it contested, with a vote share of 25.02%. This time, the Congress contested only 100 seats, going into the elections in an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party, Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Telangana Jana Samithi .Yet, it won 19 seats and improved its vote share to 28.40%, an increase of 3.38 percentage points.

The TDP, which had won 15 out of 72 the assembly seats it contested in 2014 with a vote share of 14.55%, suffered heavily this time after joining the Congress-led Maha Kootami (grand alliance). It won only two assembly seats out of the 13 it contested and its vote share came down to just 3.50%. The CPI, which won just one seat with a 0.8% vote share in 2014, drew a blank this time. The newly formed TJS failed to open its account.

According to reports from several parts of Telangana, there was hardly any transfer of votes from TDP and other alliance partners to the Congress, given that seatsharing talks had dragged on until the deadline for filing of nominations.

“The grand alliance was formed only at the superficial level, but in the actual battle ground, the Congress gained little from the alliance due to lack of coordination among the cadres of alliance partners,” political analyst S Ramakrishna said.

Moreover, the TDP vote bank had been eroded in most parts of Telangana because of the defection of a majority of its leaders, including almost all the MLAS who were elected in 2014, to the TRS and Congress in the last fourand-a-half years.

“As such, whatever percentage of the vote Congress got this time, it is mostly on its own strength. In fact, the alliance with the TDP has done more harm than good to the Congress; otherwise, its percentage of votes and number of seats also would have been more, though not to the extent of defeating the TRS,” said a Congress leader, requesting anonymity.

The fall in the voting percentage of the alliance partners led to an improvement in the vote share of the TRS from 34.04% to 46.90% –an increase of 12.86 percentage points. The party, which had won 63 seats in 2014, improved its tally to 88 seats.

On the other hand, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which won five out of the 47 seats it had contested in 2014 with a voting percentage of 7.1%, managed to win just one seat although it contested as many as 118 and its vote share also remained more or less the same at 7%.

The BJP spoiled the winning prospects of the Congress in at least half-a-dozen seats with thin margins, because the BJP scored a sizable number of votes there. In these constituencies, Muslims have a considerable presence and they voted for the TRS, while the BJP split the Hindu votes.

At the same time, candidates who contested the elections under the banners of different political parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party, Shiv Sena, All India Forward Bloc, Samajwadi Forward Bloc and Bahujan Left Front, spoiled the winning chances of the Congress in some constituencies – like Bellampalli, Balkonda, Jangaon, Nagarjunagar and Vikarabad.