THE CONGRESS SHOWS ITS HAND

If Hyderabad hosted a Congress Working Committee meeting on September 16-17, followed by a party rally on the city’s outskirts, the significance of the choice of venue was not lost on anyone.

- Amarnath K. Menon

These were grand preparatory gestures, heralding the Grand Old Party’s campaign to rediscover itself as a ruling force in Telangana—the state it had helped create. As the party that led the UPA, it was the Congress that had taken the initiative and adopted the legislation in Parliament for the formation of the separate state in 2014. But it had had to suffer the ignominy of losing the assembly poll that year to a regional party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (now the Bharat Rashtra Samithi or BRS). It lost in 2018 too, and practically vanished from the political map in its former stronghold. This time, it’s determined to wrest the state back from Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) in the assembly election due at the end of the year.