Former cricketer Mohammed Azharuddin has been made working president of the Congress unit in Telangana, with party president Rahul Gandhi making 15 appointments in a day in the election-bound state.
Apart from Azharuddin as working president, two vice-presidents, eight general secretaries and four secretaries were appointed on Friday with barely a week to go for polling. The state votes on December 7 to elect a new Assembly.
If the choice of Azharuddin appeared aimed at wooing Muslim voters, the other appointments too seem to have been dictated by the necessity to assuage hurt feelings of other social groups, including OBCs and Dalits, after the dominance of Reddys in candidate selection.
A shuffle in the state leadership while electioneering is in full swing is rare.
Earlier this month — on November 15 — Jetti Kusum Kumar was made working president. Before that, two working presidents — A. Revanth Reddy and Ponnam Prabhakar — were appointed on September 19.
These appointments have made although two working presidents, 13 vice-presidents and 30 general secretaries were already assisting state unit chief Uttam Kumar Reddy and betray lack of foresight in election planning.
Azharuddin, who belongs to Hyderabad, has never been active politically in either Andhra Pradesh or Telangana. He contested his first Lok Sabha election from Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh and the second from Tonk-Sawai Madhopur in Rajasthan. He now intends to shift to Secunderabad in Telangana to contest his third Lok Sabha election.
But his last-minute appointment suggests the Congress is desperate to lure Muslim voters away from the ruling TRS (Telangana Rashtra Samithi). Telangana has a large Muslim presence — 12 per cent of the population — and the Congress had presumed the community would support it because the TRS-BJP nexus was not a secret.
The Congress highlighted in its campaign that the Assembly election had been advanced only because chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao wanted to align with Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha election, but this does not seem to have worked.
The TRS’s pact with Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM has helped to dilute any Muslim fears — the firebrand Hyderabad leader has passionately appealed to his community not to vote for the Congress, alleging it has often compromised with communalism.
The Congress sent veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad to turn the tide but it appears to be a case of too little, too late.
The BJP and the TRS have taken care to attack each other publicly.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah have been particularly harsh on chief minister Rao to ensure Muslim votes do not go to the Congress.
Rao, whose government gives Rs 1 lakh for the marriage of each Muslim girl under the Shaadi Mubarak scheme, has also firmly ruled out any future alliance with the BJP.
Rao has instead portrayed TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu, who is in alliance with the Congress, as a BJP agent trying to make inroads into Telangana by using the Congress.
Rao has also focused on Naidu’s initial anti-Telangana stance and asked voters if they wanted Andhra hegemony on the state.
Some Congress leaders admit the alliance with TDP could boomerang even as plain arithmetic suggests this combination can overtake TRS without much difficulty. The TRS got 34.3 per cent votes in 2014 while the Congress and TDP together polled 39.90 per cent. This alliance now also includes the CPI and the TJS (Telangana Jana Samithi).
