After K Kavitha's exit, Congress and BJP eye gains from BRS setback

Following the departure of K Kavitha, daughter of BRS leader KCR, the Congress and the BJP are looking for ways to capitalise on the setback to the party

Eatala Rajender’s prognosis for the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) is bleak. “This party is finished,” he told Business Standard on the phone from Hyderabad after party founder K Chandrashekar Rao’s (KCR’s) daughter K Kavitha quit the party and all government positions after making serious allegations of corruption about other family members, specifically her cousin T Harish Rao. 

“Every party has contradictions: Friendly rivalries over power and money, resolved through internal mechanisms by the leadership. In this party now, every member of the family claims to be a leader. And if everyone is a leader, everyone wants to become chief minister, make money, do dadagiri, who will sort out the disputes?” 

He should know. Although now in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rajender was a founder member of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the precursor to the BRS. In 2001, when KCR founded the party, Rajender was by his side, putting it together brick by brick along with Harish, KCR’s nephew. After the TRS blazed its way to victory, becoming one of India’s newest political parties to form a government in the newly created Telangana, Rajender became an MLA from the Huzurabad constituency (2014-18) and finance minister. He was made health minister in the TRS’s second term. He quit the TRS when KCR ordered an enquiry against him on charges of land encroachment, allegedly egged on by members of the family. He joined the BJP in 2021. His association with the TRS was emotional and intense.  He now believes the “glamour” and the “legitimacy” of KCR as the man who led the struggle for the creation of Telangana has ended, especially after an enquiry commission set up by the state government found him guilty of corruption in the Kaleshwaram irrigation project and referred the matter to the Central Board of Investigation (as finance minister, the commission found him “complicit”). And as the party had turned into little more than KCR and his family, its organisational structures became prisoner to family loyalties. 

“It was fine as long as they (the KCR clan) were in power. After they lost the Assembly elections (in 2023, the party won only 39 of the 119 seats) the BRS began to ignore party structures. Cadres began looking to individual members of the family. To court groups, you need to have money. Every member of the family got into money-making,” said a Hyderabad-based political analyst who is close to the Congress and did not want to be identified. “Why has the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) survived repeated defeats? Because as a party it created structures. In ignoring structures, KCR made the same mistake as Jagan (Mohan Reddy, leader of the YSR Congress).” 

However, Kavitha, he says, is unlikely to give in without a fight. And the political capital she is invested in is the legacy of KCR, who is being “manipulated” by a coterie — the prime target being Harish. Kavitha’s disgruntlement and hurt stem from the perceived lack of support from her family after she was sent to prison for alleged money-laundering charges. In her letter to her father and at her press conference when she quit the party, she said no one from her party and family “supported” her. And that they would do the same to her father and brother. 

But others in the party are not buying this, especially the criticism of Harish. “He worked tirelessly, without ego, and remained accessible to all as an activist, MLA and minister. Targeting him now is nothing short of a betrayal of the BRS and Telangana,” said former minister S Niranjan Reddy. 

Dubbak MLA Kotha Prabhakar Reddy and Sangareddy MLA Chintha Prabhakar said Harish was one of the most steadfast leaders in the party who stayed with the BRS even after he was denied a Cabinet post following the 2018 Assembly elections.

So what damage can Kavitha’s exit do to the BRS? Rajender said bigger considerations were at work. “The ferocity of people’s anger with the BRS expressed itself in the last Assembly election and the Congress took advantage of it. People did not vote for the Congress. They voted against the BRS. And now, if they can find the right leadership, the advantage is with the BJP.” There are ifs and buts here. 

Even while in the BRS, Kavitha continued to support an organisation called Telangana Jagruthi, a socio-cultural organisation with a focus on the rights of women and Dalits. Earlier this year, she launched the Singareni Jagruthi, operating in the Singareni coal belt. The Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL) operates 17 opencast and 22 underground mines across six districts in Telangana, employing nearly 42,000 workers, and Kavitha led a strike in 2020, protesting its privatisation. 

She has said that she has no plans of launching a political party or joining one. But Assembly polls are three years away.

A vote-share analysis reveals that if she exerts herself, she could leverage her personal network and cadre loyalty to split the BRS vote in Nizamabad (which swung from the BRS to the Congress in 2023), neighbouring Kamareddy (KCR himself contested the Assembly seat in 2023 and lost), and some urban pockets of Bodhan-Nizamabad. In many key constituencies in the 2023 Assembly elections, the winning margin was between 5,000 and 30,000 votes. A new Kavitha platform that takes 8 -12 per cent of the BRS vote where the BRS margin over its nearest rival is less than 10,000 votes could represent the difference between victory and defeat. Several seats in the Nizamabad-Kamareddy pocket qualify, the Election Commission data shows.

But this is just arithmetic. Both the Congress and the BJP are looking for ways to capitalise on the setback to the BRS. The biggest question is: Will the Kavitha disruption sustain for three years? And will appeals to voters about injustices to her father by others in the family cut any ice? “A man called Shakespeare wrote a play called King Lear,” said the analyst (the play was about two ungrateful daughters and their angelic sister). “That was long ago.”