TELANGANA TICKING...
Adizzying set of events has sent temperatures soaring over the political skies in Telangana, with various strands of the provincial and the national getting entangled in mutually aggravating ways. The upcoming byelection to the Munugode assembly seat would have been a routine headline in another time. But this time, it’s set against a red-hot context: the BJP is going for broke to displace the Congress as the main challenger to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in the 2023 assembly polls, so an escalation of the pitch is audible on all planes. Hyderabad, 80-odd km west of Munugode, was boiling after a replay of the Nupur Sharma episode—with the BJP suspending MLA T. Raja Singh on August 23, hours after he was arrested for a video containing insulting references to Prophet Mohammed. The day saw another high-profile BJP arrest: state unit chief Bandi Sanjay was picked from a protest site after the BJP scaled up hostilities by alleging that Kalvakuntla Kavitha, TRS MLC and daughter of CM K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), was linked to the Delhi liquor scam, a claim she responded to with a defamation case.
Two days earlier, action was focused on Munugode itself, with KCR and Union home minister Amit Shah holding rallies on successive days over the weekend, giving the contest a distinct air of something much bigger than just a lone provincial bypoll—indeed, a bellwether event to judge which way Telangana is headed ahead of 2023. The resignation of Komatireddy Rajagopal Reddy, who had won the seat for the Congress in 2018, necessitated the bypoll: he ’s contesting this time on a BJP ticket. It looks to be all uphill for the Congress in what’s turning into a pitched battle between the TRS and the BJP. For a party that had a strong presence in Nalgonda district, within which