In the latest case of regional parties scoring self-goals to the advantage of the BJP in states where its Hindutva agenda gets no traction, the Bharata Rashtra Samiti (BRS) in Telangana is caught in a bitter tussle between claimants to the party founder’s legacy. Kalvakuntla Kavitha, the daughter of ageing party supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), quit the party on a peeve this week and launched her own, vowing to bring the electorate’s wrath upon her brother, the presumed heir KT Rama Rao and cousin K Harish Rao.
Kavitha is an ambitious politician whose claims to eminence in the BRS have consistently been ignored by KCR, whose word is law in the party. She spent five months in Tihar jail in 2024 for allegedly having a hand in the Delhi liquor scam and was, untypically for the Modi-Shah dispensation, enlarged on bail. The terms of her release have been the subject of speculation in Telangana politics.
Her actions subsequently have kept her father’s party unsettled as it contends with the twin challenges of recovering ground lost to the Congress and preventing the emergence of the BJP as an alternative. As a vote magnet, her talents are insubstantial but her eloquence in the media suits the BJP well in projecting the BRS as a divided house.
Exploiting succession tussles within adversary parties is a strategy employed by the BJP in expanding its footprint in states where there are no Hindu-Muslim polarities to exploit and where its image as a north Indian party is a disadvantage in courting voters steeped in cultural and linguistic pride.
This often involves backing dissident family members or splinter factions to weaken a rival party and create space for itself to grow into. In this respect, the BJP follows the playbook of the British who in the 19th century used the Doctrine of Lapse to gobble up subcontinental kingdoms big and small.
Telangana is not only the latest theatre where succession tussles are playing into the hands of the BJP. In Maharashtra, splits within the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), both parties with claims to being custodians of regional pride, helped the saffron brigade emerge as a natural alternative.
In Bihar as we speak, succession difficulties in the Rashtriya Janata Dal are helping to cement the BJP’s new-found position as the party of power. In UP, differences between Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle Shivpal Yadav led to the rout of the Samajwadi Party in 2017. In Odisha too, a perceived succession vacuum after Navin Patnaik was a decisive factor in the BJP coming to power in a state where it had been a marginal player for decades.
The BJP is so invested in this strategy that it is currently probing the space between Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi. Using a video of the latter making amiable conversation with Prime Minister Modi at an end-of-session meeting hosted by speaker Om Birla, the saffron party’s covert tricks department has been insinuating differences between the brother-sister duo.
The similarity in the playbooks of the BJP and the British raj might be accidental and uncanny but the insight it provides is common. The purpose of one was the establishment of an imperium and the vision of the other is the creation of a monolithic India.