By Mohd. Ismail Khan, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad: BJP is leaving no stone unturned to galvanize support to defeat Syed Ibrahim, the lone Muslim candidate for Mahbubnagar assembly constituency by-election in Andhra Pradesh.
BJP is contesting only two assembly seats out of 7 going to poll — Mahbubnagar and Kovur. Political pundits in the state feel that BJP is going to lose even deposit in Kovur where it has hardly any presence. The reason the party is contesting Kovur is that they don’t want to bee seen targeting only TRS, its former ally, for fielding a Muslim candidate in Mahbubnagar.
The focus of whole BJP leadership is now on winning Mahbubnagar assembly seat. From state unit president to national leaders, every one is campaigning in Mahbubnagar. BJP’s student wing ABVP has also jumped into poll campaign. ABVP is taking students from Osmania University, the epic center of the Telangana movement, to campaign for the party in order to arouse the Telangana sentiments in Mahbubnagar. National leaders like Prakash Javadekar and Venkaiah Naidu are campaigning furiously and other national leaders are expected to join in. For BJP it is now a matter of do or die. If they win this assembly segment then it will be a gateway for the party to get more seats in the region in 2014 elections. The victory will make clear the party is not second to TRS in the region, and the party can repeat its same strategy which they are using in Mahbubnagar of mixing Telangana sentiments with Hindutva to polarize the polls.
On the other hand in TRS camp the party supremo seems more than confident in winning the seat. In a press conference organized by Jamaat-e-Islami to show support for the TRS candidate in Mahbubnagar, K. Chandrashekar Rao announced that his candidate Syed Ibrahim has already won, the polling will be just to see with how many margin he is going to win. But the interesting thing is this overconfidence is coming even after giving just three hours for the campaign in Mahbubnagar, while in other assembly segments where TRS is sure to win he is allotting whole day for the campaign. If this was not enough for Syed Ibrahim then one more blow comes up: Mahbubnagar joint action committee which consists of pro Telangana employees and other associations has offered unconditional support to BJP.
Mahbubnagar assembly constituency has over 1.86 lakh voters out of which 42,000 are Muslims. Syed Ibrahim had contested in the 2009 assembly election but lost with a margin of 5000 votes and came second to the Congress candidate. After the death of that Congress MLA Rajeshwar Reddy, Syed Ibrahim has once again emerged as the strongest candidate. But BJP has polarized the whole election campaign, with even Hindu Vahini volunteers campaigning for the BJP candidate Srinivas Reddy, and on the other side Jamaat-e-Islami cadres and Urdu media heavily campaigning for Syed Ibrahim.
The March 21 results of Mahbubnagar assembly segment are going to impact the Muslim outlook towards the Telangana movement. If Syed Ibrahim is defeated by BJP then Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen’s stand will be vindicated that if Telangana will be formed the region will become communalized and BJP will become more powerful.