HYDERABAD: What’s in a name? Possibly everything, especially with political survival and its future at stake, if the party happens to be Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS).
If some senior BRS leaders, who say they are voicing the opinion of party cadres, are anything to go by, it is high time for the party to revert to its original avatar of being the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), and dump the BRS name.
Voicing this at the ongoing Lok Sabha constituency-level meetings of the party at the BRS headquarters of Telangana Bhavan, senior party leader, former minister and now MLA, Kadiyam Srihari, is learnt to have brought up the topic of name change.
Speaking at the Warangal constituency meeting on Wednesday, Srihari is reported to have said that he was bringing this important aspect to the notice of the party leadership, and urged BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao, who chaired the meeting, to “take note of the sentiments of the party workers.”
It was in December 2022, 21 years after the party was formed, that TRS president and the then chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao announced the change of name to BRS, along with plans to take the party to other states. He launched a serious exercise to make its presence felt in Maharashtra.
Subsequently, a BRS state unit was started in Andhra Pradesh but recently, after the party’s loss in the Telangana Assembly elections, the BRS AP leaders quit the party. Chandrashekar Rao had also held parleys with DMK, Trinamool Congress, Janata Dal and a few others, including Samajwadi Party, to strike up alliances but those have not yet worked out.
During the ongoing Lok Sabha elections preparatory meetings — which have been functioning as pressure release valves, providing opportunities to top party leaders to instil some confidence among its cadres — various reasons have been put forth for the party’s recent election losses.
Among these, which Rama Rao too agreed upon, were improper and one-sided candidate selection, inefficient and incomplete implementation of government welfare schemes, as well as how people of Telangana did not know how to make the right choice by rejecting BRS candidates and voting for Congress or the BJP.
Now, added into this mix is the simmering demand for changing the name of BRS to TRS, and reaffirming the party’s commitment to Telangana: With Srihari and others saying that the name change to BRS was taken by the people as a sign that Telangana no longer mattered to the party.
