In the last Telangana Assembly election in 2018, Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao decided to go for early polls months before his government’s term ended. The decision worked well for the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) which saw a landslide victory by winning 88 out of the 119 seats. This was a jump up from the previous election held in 2014 just before Telangana state was officially carved out of Andhra Pradesh, when the party won 63 seats. But in this election, KCR’s party, now called Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), is expected to face a tough fight from Congress, according to political analysts, activists working on the ground, as well as pre-poll surveys.
The BJP, too, has been making attempts to widen its presence, bolstered by its success in the 2020 Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections, following a communally charged campaign. It has since continued to try and make inroads in the state through communal rhetoric and other means.
Read: From four seats to 48: How the BJP has grown in the Hyderabad municipal polls
Also read: Opinion: Are Assembly elections in Telangana a prelude to a communal future?
As Telangana gears up to vote on Thursday, November 30, there’s curiosity over swing votes, and which seats are most likely to oscillate to welcome a new candidate from a different party. Here’s a look back at some of the constituencies which saw the closest contests in 2018, where the MLA won with a razor-thin margin.
While the BJP’s overall vote share has remained more or less the same in 2014 and 2018, the Congress vote share had gone up about three-and-a-half percentage points despite losing a few seats, while TRS’s vote share went up considerably in this period.