20 top UP BJP leaders reach Hyderabad for party’s national executive meet

LUCKNOW: Ahead of BJP’s national executive meet to be held in Hyderabad on July 2-3, the party has sent a host of senior party leaders from Uttar Pradesh and ministers in the Yogi Adityanath cabinet to camp in the Telangana capital. The leaders have been asked to begin the spadework for the Telangana elections due next year in coordination with the local leadership.As many as 20 leaders from UP left for Hyderabad late Wednesday evening and are expected to return to Lucknow by July 5 after the national executive. These include state BJP chief Swatantra Dev Singh, deputy CM Keshav Maurya besides Union ministers BL Verma, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sanjeev Balyan and Mahendra Nath Pandey.CM Yogi is expected to reach Hyderabad on July 2 amid speculation about his visit to the Bhagyalakshmi temple adjoining Charminar.In all, around 300 BJP leaders from all the country are expected to throng the state capital even as the party seeks to mobilize supporters and workers from all 119 assembly seats. The national executive meet, scheduled to be organised in the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC), is being hosted in the city after a gap of 18 years.BJP national president JP Nadda, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah, chief ministers of 19 states and other BJP senior leaders will participate in the meeting.BJP sources said that Telangana was one of the key elections for the party ahead of the Lok Sabha polls due in 2024. While the state was formed in June 2014, the chief minister and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief K Chandrashekhar Rao did not complete the five-year term and called for early elections in 2018. The move paid off and TRS managed to bag 88 seats, restricting BJP to just one – Goshamahal from where T Raja Singh won. BJP apprehends that Rao may do it again by calling for an early election in what may not give adequate preparatory time to the opposition.Highly placed sources in BJP said that the party plans to make Amberpet assembly seat the epicentre of a high-decibel campaign. This was the seat from where BJP’s G Kishan Reddy lost to Kaleru Venkatesham of TRS by less than 1,200 votes in 2018 assembly elections. In 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP fielded Reddy from Secunderabad seat which he won by defeating TRS’s Talasani Sai Kiran Yadav by a margin of over 62,000 votes. He subsequently got a berth in the Narendra Modi cabinet and is currently Union tourism and culture minister. Of the 17 Lok Sabha seats in the state, BJP had won four – Karimnagar, Nizamabad, Secunderabad and Adilabad – while TRS won nine. Congress won three. One seat was won by AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi.