The Pawan Kalyan-led Jana Sena Party (JSP) will contest eight seats in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming Telangana assembly elections, slated for November 30, it has been announced.
Both sides have been holding seat-sharing talks, as the JSP is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The JSP had earlier planned to contest as many as 32 seats, a majority of them located in and around Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation limits and Khammam district.
Though a relatively smaller party, its fielding candidates in so many seats out of a total of 119 at stake might have cut into the BJP’s votes. The agreement now forestalls such a possibility. Filing of nominations has already begun, and the last date is November 10.
JSP Political Affairs chairman Nadendla Manohar told TNM, "We have been looking at building up our cadre here, so JSP has an important role to play,” he stated, adding that the party would contest seats in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area GHMC, and in Nalgonda and Khammam districts. The BJP has released four lists of its candidates so far, naming 100 in all.
“We did not want the vote share here to be split, as it will benefit the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), so we asked Pawan Kalyan to support us,” a BJP leader said.
JSP is set to filed constestents from Kukatpally, Tandur, Kodada, Nagarkurnool, Khammam, Kothegudem, Wyrs, Ashwaraopeta.
The JSP did not participate in the 2018 state elections, but had some impact in the subsequent 2019 Lok Sabha elections. It had joined hands with the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Jana Sena’s most notable performance was the 28000 (1.82%) votes it secured in the Malkajgiri parliament seat, which Congress chief Revanth Reddy eventually won. The seat is known to have a large number of settlers from Andhra Pradesh.
The JSP-BJP alliance also comes at a time when Pawan Kalyan has formally joined hands with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
The TDP itself had been part of the NDA in the 2014 Andhra Pradesh and Telangna Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, with JSP too supporting it. But things fell apart in 2018, when the TDP quit the NDA, avowedly because Andhra Pradesh did not get ‘Special Category Status’ from the Union government.
The 2019 Telangana state elections were held a year earlier, as BRS supremo and Chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) dissolved his government and went for early polls.
At the time TDP supremo Chandrababu Naidu forged an alliance with the Congress, but the front came a cropper, with the TDP humbled to a mere two, while the Congress managed to win 19 seats. The BRS won 88 out of 119 seats then, while the BJP, on its own, could win just one seat.
The TDP had earlier said it won’t contest in the forthcoming Telangana elections, but there was speculation that the JSP and TDP were discussing seat-sharing. Now though Pawan Kalyan’s party has gone on to join hands with the BJP.
The TDP is also looking to return to the NDA, but a decision on that is likely to be taken by the BJP only closer to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it is said.
For its part, the Jana Sena has said the alliance with the TDP held only for Andhra Pradesh.