Is KCR confused over joining the opposition front?

New Delhi: Telangana chief minister and Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao, popularly known as KCR, appears to be in a state of confusion over joining the opposition front.

KCR skipped the opposition’s meeting in Patna on June 23 because he does not want the Congress to be the nucleus of the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) front. The BRS and the Congress are the two main political parties as well as bitter rivals in Telangana.

Some months ago, KCR had embarked on a mission to form a non-Congress and non-BJP grouping that could emerge as a kingmaker in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

However, there were no takers for his national project. He had held a series of meetings with top opposition leaders, including chief ministers of Bihar (Nitish Kumar), Delhi (Arvind Kejriwal), Punjab (Bhagwant Mann), Kerala (Pinarayi Vijayan), West Bengal (Mamata Banerjee), Jharkhand (Hemat Soren), Tamil Nadu (MK Stalin) besides Bihar’s deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav.

In fact, these chief ministers had also formed a small group and named it G-8 to bring all the non-National Democratic Alliance (NDA) parties on one platform to take on the BJP in the 2024 polls. The group also wanted to put pressure on the Congress to come around without putting any conditions.

KCR had also met Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and Communist Party of India (CPI) General Secretary D Raja.

Apart from Nitish Kumar and Stalin, other top opposition leaders such as Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad were of the view that no anti-BJP front would be successful without the Congress as its fulcrum.

KCR had to finally abandon his plan of having an independent front and instead decided to convert his TRS into a national party, now called BRS.

He is now expanding his party’s footprints in Maharashtra, prompting Pawar to call the BRS a ‘B-team’ of the BJP.

The fact that KCR has been confused about his national role stems from the fact that initially he played ball with Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he assumed power in 2014 and supported all major legislations brought by the BJP in Parliament.

It was only after the BJP’s aggressive foray into Telangana that KCR felt threatened and decided to go after the saffron party. The BJP has taken many disgruntled BRS and Congress leaders into its fold, prominent among them being KCR’s close associate Eatala Rajender.

With the BJP having been ousted from power in Karnataka, both Prime Minister Modi and union home minister Amit Shah are eyeing Telangana with the saffron party launching all out efforts to win the state in the upcoming assembly elections, due in December this year.

A statement by KCR's son and state minister KT Rama Rao, also called KTR, that the opposition is obsessed with dislodging someone from power, an indirect reference to Prime Minister Modi, rather than fighting the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on principal issues confronting the country set off rumour mills abuzz that the BRS was looking at some sort of an understanding (direct or indirect) with the BJP.

But that seems unlikely as of now given that the BJP has launched an offensive against KCR and his family (his daughter K Kavitha is facing a probe in the Delhi liquor scam case) and is hoping that its fight against corruption will catapult it to power in the upcoming assembly polls.