The Telangana Rashtra Samiti-BJP alliance swept the July 27 bypolls surfing atop a Telangana tsunami that completely drowned the Congress, including state party chief D. Srinivas, and the Telugu Desam, and has the potential to unfold the road map for the future of the region.
The TRS-BJP not only retained all their seats — indeed, the TRS wrested Vemulawada from the Telugu Desam — but vastly increased the margin of their victories. Many TD candidates, and Congress nominees in some seats lost their deposits as the TRS coloured the region pink.
This is the second time the TRS is contesting on its own. In 2008, it contested 16 seats and lost seven of them. There was no such blip this time.
TRS chief K. Chandra-sekhar Rao described the verdict as a referendum on Telangana. He was joined by several others, including Mr Srinivas, who saw in the verdict a victory for Telangana statehood.
The TRS has won six seats for which results were declared by 11 pm, and the BJP the crucial seat of Nizamabad-Urban where Mr Mr Y. Lakshminarayana trounced Mr Srinivas by 11,981 votes. The TRS has recorded massive leads in the other constituencies where counting of ballot papers is still progressing: Yellareddy. Sircilla. Huzurabad, Warangal (West) and Korutla. The TRS has in its kitty Siddipet, Dharmapuri (SC), Mancheriyal, Chennur, Sirpur and Vemulawada, where polling was held using EVMs
Mr T. Harish Rao retained Siddipet by 95,381 votes, the kind of majority usually seen in Lok Sabha elections. All other party leaders secured majorities ranging from 10,000 to 60,000 votes.
Discarded by the wayside were the Congress heavyweights, among them Mr Srinivas, the former MP, Mr A. Indrakaran Reddy, and former ministers G. Vinod, J. Ratnakara Rao and Shabbir Ali. The plight of the TD was worse: The party conceded Vemulavada, and lost its deposit in the process.
TD chief N. Chandrababu Naidu saw the results as a setback caused by the party concentrating on the Babli project and ignoring the bypoll campaign.
The bypoll results are set to bring several changes both at the government and the Congress organisational level if at all the mood at the party headquarters in Delhi is anything to go by. Mr Srinivas, it is reliably learnt, has submitted his resignation to the party president. Congress sources indicated that a high-level review of the electoral disaster will take place shortly before the leadership initiates some corrective steps.