KCR's Backward Classes Challenge

In a last-minute rejig, Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) chose Gadwal Vijayalakshmi as the mayor of Hyderabad on February 11, and named frontrunner Mothe Srilatha Reddy as her deputy.

- Amarnath K. Menon

In a last-minute rejig, Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) chose Gadwal Vijayalakshmi as the mayor of Hyderabad on February 11, and named frontrunner Mothe Srilatha Reddy as her deputy. Though the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) was reneging on its promise that a woman from the influential Reddy community would be the new mayor, the party’s sub-par performance in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls is believed to have forced KCR’s hand. Vijayalakshmi’s appointment, the TRS hopes, will placate the irate backward classes, whose patience with the party seems to be wearing thin.

The GHMC urban agglomerat ion accounts for about a third of Telan gana’s population and so it was imperative for KCR to signal to the backwards (who make up about 52 per cent of the state’s population) that their interests were still safe in his hands. The backwards cohort was in the forefront of the separate statehood campaign that KCR ran, and feel slighted that the TRS, which has been in power for seven years, has not yet ensured commensurate reservation in education/ jobs for them (they currently have 29 per cent reservation in the state).

In 2018, the high court of Telangana, on a petition filed by OBC leader and All India Congress Committee spokesperson Sravan Dasoju, asked the state to enumerate and conduct a socioeconomic study of the backward classes in the state. This was needed to categorise the communities (a longpending demand of the Most Backward Classes) and to raise reservation quotas according to their population. But the state is yet to act on it.