HYDERABAD: With less than a fortnight to go before the BJP holds its biggest political conclave in the city on July 2 and 3, it is becoming more and more evident that the BJP’s big message for Telangana will be that it will go after Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, and the TRS rule over the past eight years as the party shifts its activity into higher gears in its drive to come to power in the state.
While BJP leaders have been going hammer and tongs at the Chief Minister and the TRS government for some time, the party appears to have earnestly joined the online battle, something the ruling party had been adept for a while now when it comes to attempts to influence social media users towards believing its version of the stories.
The recent past few days have seen an uptick in social media posts by the state BJP unit targeting the Chief Minister, including the coopting and admitting to the TRS leaders from other parties who were against formation of Telangana state, or on distributing positions to members of his immediate and extended family. In a running series of posts on ‘KCR’s failures’, and ‘Narendra Modi’s victories’, the party has been listing various state schemes that the BJP said were not implemented fully, or were only partially implemented by the TRS government, and compared them with similar Central government schemes.
The party also kept reminding its online followers on what it called the government jumping to rescue the accused in the Jubilee Hills gang rape case in May, but did not react to the strike by students of IIIT Basar.
A recurring theme of the BJP’s online attacks on the Chief Minister has been what the party leaders have been calling ‘dictatorial’ rule by Chandrashekar Rao. The tweets or posts on other social media platforms come from a small team that also does research on talking points for the party, a BJP leader explained.
These are supplemented by posts designed by support teams of individual leaders such as the state BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar, who too share the content they create with the online team who then post them on social media platforms, he explained.
