Bharatiya Janata Party wrested the Dubbak assembly seat in Telangana in a nail-biting finish by defeating ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi albeit with a slender margin of 1,470 votes.
The see-saw battle, which witnessed a lot of fluctuations till the completion of 23 rounds of counting in the evening, finally handed the victory to BJP candidate M Raghunandan Rao over TRS candidate Solipeta Sujatha.
Rao secured 62,772 votes, while Sujatha ended up with 61,302 votes. Congress candidate Cheruku Srinivas Reddy finished a poor third with 21,819 votes.
More than a victory for the BJP, the result in Dubbak can be viewed as a big setback to the TRS which had lost a by-election in the last six years after the formation of Telangana.
In the last elections held in December 2018, the TRS won the Dubbak seat with a massive majority of 62,500 votes. Now, the party could not record even this figure in the total number of polled by it.
If at all anyone has to be blamed for the loss of TRS in Dubbak bypolls, it should be none other than TRS president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao. It was because of his overconfidence that the party had to face this sorry state of affairs.
Despite strong resistance from the party leaders and cadres in Dubbak, including his nephew and minister T Harish Rao, KCR chose to field Solipeta Sujatha, widow of former MLA Solipeta Ramachandra Reddy, whose death resulted in the by-elections.
Sujatha is new to politics and has no connection with the people of the constituency. Secondly, she has no mass appeal and cannot even speak properly in public. Yet, KCR thought she would win because of sympathy factor.
Thirdly, KCR did not send any ministers or senior leaders for the campaign. He, himself, did not address a single public meeting though there were requests from the local leaders.
Instead, he put the entire responsibility of securing victory to TRS on Harish Rao. Though Harish struggled a lot for the party’s victory, it was not sufficient to win over the people. On the other hand, BJP candidate Rao had made all out efforts to win the seat.