Hyderabad: Congress candidate Naveen Yadav registered an impressive victory in the Jubilee Hills Assembly bypoll in Telangana, defeating his nearest rival and Bharat Rashtra Samithi’s Maganti Sunitha Gopinath by a margin of nearly 25,000 votes.
Celebrations began in Hyderabad early as Naveen’s lead reached around 20,000 votes after eight rounds of counting. His lead stood at 24,729 when all 10 rounds of counting were completed around 2.30 pm, according to the Election Commission website.
Yadav garnered 98,988 votes, while Sunitha polled 74,259. Deepak Reddy Lankala of the
Bharatiya Janata Party was at the third position with 17,061 votes.
Naveen contested Jubilee Hills twice before, in 2014 as an AIMIM candidate and in 2018 as an Independent.
The bypoll, conducted on 11 November, was necessitated by the death of sitting BRS Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Maganti Gopinath in June. It’s the second such bypoll in Telangana since the Revanth Reddy-led Telangana Congress came to power in November 2023.
In June 2024, the Secunderabad Cantonment bypoll was held after BRS MLA Lasya Nanditha died in a car crash in February, three months after winning her first election.
Congress candidate Sri Ganesh won the June byelection, defeating BJP’s Vamsha Tilak and BRS nominee Lasya Niveditha, Nanditha’s sister.
In Hyderabad, where the BRS won the vast majority of assembly seats despite an overall drubbing and losing power after two terms; the Congress’s victory in the Cantonment and now Jubilee Hills is being seen as Revanth Reddy gaining considerable hold over the city.
A consequent electoral victory, ahead of the crucial local body polls and Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections, analysts say, will strengthen Revanth’s position in the party’s leadership eyes in Delhi.
The Jubilee Hills bypoll is prestigious for the BRS, whose Gopinath won it three times, first as a Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MLA in 2014 and again for the then Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS).
The BRS fielded Maganti’s widow, Sunitha, and campaigned extensively, accusing CM Revanth of misgovernance and “unkept poll promises like the six welfare guarantees”. BRS Working President K.T. Rama Rao (KTR) dared Revanth to seek votes based on his nearly two-year rule, treating it as a referendum.
The former minister urged voters to “deliver a decisive verdict” by electing the BRS in order “to force the Congress to implement its guarantees,” and contrasted the BRS’s decade of governance to “two years of destruction of Telangana under the Congress”.
KTR charged that Revanth Reddy’s tenure “reversed the progress, hitting the real estate, transport and small trades while driving away investment” as opposed to the information technology sector, construction of the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, 42 flyovers and underpasses, etc, done during the BRS’ decade in power.
The former state municipal and urban development minister also lambasted the Congress “for unleashing the Hyderabad Disaster Management and Asset Protection Agency (HYDRAA) on the poor.”
Revanth Reddy, on the other hand, left no stone unturned for his winning feat in Jubilee Hills.
For the first time, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) is supporting a Congress nominee in an election since walking out of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2012.
The AIMIM sat out of the elections in the segment with over one lakh Muslim votes, out of the total of about four lakh, and extended tacit support to the Congress candidate.
This was even as Hyderabad Member of Parliament Asaduddin Owaisi fielded party candidates in Bihar, a move seen as damaging the RJD-Congress-compromised Mahagathbandhan alliance’s prospects, the state was preparing for its assembly polls in the north Indian state.
Days before the polls, Revanth, with the high command’s approval, made former cricketer and MP Mohammed Azharuddin a minister in his cabinet that previously lacked a Muslim face.
With Azharuddin, Revanth could not only appeal to the dominant Muslim votes in Jubilee Hills, but also put a stop to the prevalent criticism that the Congress lacked a Muslim face in a state where the community constitutes about 13 per cent.
Azharuddin was given the charge of the Public Enterprises & Minority Welfare departments.
Revanth addressed a few rallies in the constituency seeking votes from all the sections, while also deploying his several ministers for campaigning in the high-stakes bypoll.
Turning confident as the poll date neared, CM Revanth hit back at KTR, calling upon the Jubilee Hills voters to gauge the bypoll from the lens of development and governance of the past two decades, “what the Congress achieved between 2004 and 2014 and again since 2023, against the ‘lost decade under the BRS.”
The BJP had to be content with 11,928 votes so far, compared to its 25,866 votes in the 2023 assembly elections here.
“We know our strength, position here in the constituency. We had to be in the contest and campaign for votes, to save face,” a senior party leader told ThePrint.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)
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