Telangana Congress readies to dissect municipal poll debacle

Hyderabad: Telangana Congress has decided to take up postmortem of the results of the municipal elections to find out the reasons for the bad performance of the party.

PCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy recently told the media in an informal chat that postmortem of results would be taken up to know the reasons for the bad performance of the party.

He said that the data of the voting would be gathered from all the municipalities and it would be analysed. Steps would be taken to strengthen the party after finding the reasons for the poor performance. Party leaders said that Congress had hoped to put up a good show in the municipal elections as they had been held in urban areas.

Most of the urban people are not covered under schemes like RythuBandhu and others.

The basic amenities are poor in the municipalities and people of the ULBs are angry with the government. Most of the municipalities do not have proper drinking water supply and sanitation was quite poor.

As the Congress had won a MLC seat in the elections to the Legislative Council, the educated people were angry with the ruling party and they would vote against it in the urban body polls.

They said that these expectations went wrong as the party won just 14 per cent of the wards. The voting share also did not improve as it recorded just 21 per cent. The BJP has been closely following the Congress and scored 14 per cent of the votes. The ruling TRS got 46 per cent of votes and was way ahead of the BJP and Congress.

The leaders said that apart from money and liquor power being used by the ruling party, several other issues also influenced the minds of the people. They said that the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act divided the voters and Muslim votes went to the ruling TRS.

A leader from Adilabad said that in spite of their earnest requests to the Muslims to vote for the Congress, they gave preference to TRS than Congress. Though Congres fought against the CAA, the Muslims did show interest to give their votes.

With the help of CAA issue, the BJP was able to get more votes of young people of the urban areas and improved its performance. Though the saffron party struggled to find candidates, it put up a good performance.

Congress leaders said that with the help of the data of voting of the municipalities they would try to find out where the party did well and where it has fallen behind. This exercise would provide ideas to improve the party performance.