The shocking defeat of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter Kavitha in Nizamabad is being attributed to the traditional Congress voters shifting their loyalties to the saffron party.

It is due to this change, BJP nominee D Arvind could upset Kavitha with a margin was 70,875 votes. In the process, Congress candidate Madhu Yaskhi, who garnered 68,000 of 11.01 lakh total votes polled, lost his security deposit.

In 2014, Kavitha had won the seat with a majority of 1.67 lakh votes. Since the Lok Sabha poll results were announced on Thursday, the pink party has not been able to come to terms with the reality that KCR’s daughter could lose an election, especially at a time when the TRS had bulldozed its way to a landslide victory in Assembly elections, barely five months ago, in December.

Kavitha, however, in a late night tweet said that she would continue to serve people regardless of the election outcome.  She also congratulated her BJP rival Arvind, against whom she had carried out a bitter campaign, on his victory. “Congratulations Arvind garu for winning the election,” she said.

TRS smells a rat

In the last December Assembly elections, TRS candidates won all the seven segments that constitute Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency by polling 5.69 lakh votes (51.96 per cent), followed by Congress (3.41 lakh votes, 30.98 per cent) and BJP (92,652 votes, 8.41 per cent).

In a matter of five months, the BJP, which was an underdog, rose like a phoenix and captured Nizamabad with a margin of 70,875 votes. If one takes a close look at the Assembly segment-wise voting in Nizamabad in the present election, BJP candidate polled more votes in Korutla (77,023), Jagityal (66179), Armoor (72,472), Balkonda (68,064) and Nizamabad Rural (77,443). Kavitha polled more votes than Arvind in Nizamabad Urban (67,700) and Bodhan (55,279).

A careful examination of the statistics show that the Congress voters had shifted to the BJP this time, which in fact made the TRS smell a rat. It alleged that the BJP had reached out to the Congress which was not in a position to trounce Kavitha on its own and took its support to vanquish the incumbent.

In fact, Arvind had been campaigning against Kavitha for a long time on several issues which had made Kavitha lodge a strong complaint with the TRS state leadership against his father and Rajya Sabha member D Srinivas, who was in TRS, for not keeping his son on the leash.

KCR’s comment

Arvind, who was working quietly, had capitalised on Modi wave that was building across the country and chief minister’s comment during the campaign against BJP’s brand of Hindutva that is perceived to have not gone down well with the people not just in Nizamabad but in neighbouring Karimnagar too.

This apart, the BJP had invited Home Minister Rajnath Singh to Nizamabad and made him promise location of turmeric board for which an agitation had been building, climaxing in 170 farmers filing nomination papers for Nizamabad seat and a couple of them even going to Varanasi to take on PM Narendra Modi.

Though Kavitha had tried to shift blame onto the BJP that if no turmeric board had been set up it was not because of lack of effort on her part, she had said that she had made several representations in Delhi but BJP honchos had paid little attention.

At the end of the day, BJP walked way with the cake, even though it had not set up a tumeric board.