The sense of a ‘fading’? Battered BRS faces fresh blow with Kavitha’s arrest ahead of LS polls

From appearing to be in a winning position for months ahead of the November 2023 Telangana Assembly elections, enough for its chief K Chandrashekar Rao to nurture national ambitions, to almost becoming “inconsequential” in its backyard in the Lok Sabha polls, the fall of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in a span of just over four months has been spectacularly drastic.

The arrest of KCR’s daughter K Kavitha on Friday, in the Delhi excise policy case, while long-expected, will only add to the sense of unravelling about the party that ruled Telangana for 10 years till losing power in the recent Assembly polls.

And yet, as recently as August last year, the BRS – its rechristening from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi reflective of KCR’s hopes of rallying the Opposition behind him – seemed far ahead of its rivals in Telangana.

With three months to go for the Assembly polls, the BRS had declared candidates for 115 of the 119 seats, an expression of its confidence, and its intention of gaining the first mover’s advantage – especially against its main rival Congress, a party known to hem and haw towards choosing candidates.

The BRS even defied naysayers who feared the weight of two tenures of anti-incumbency, by retaining most of its sitting MLAs. The results which reduced the party to 39 seats from 88 in 2018 were devastating for KCR, the face of not just the BRS but Telangana itself, having led the struggle for the creation of the state.

The Congress, having wrested power in a second southern state after Karnataka months earlier, got a fresh breath of life from its 64-seat win. It has since launched a two-pronged attack on the BRS – on its government’s alleged mis-governance, and on the party’s political standing in the state.

As per