Bharatiya Janata Party, in association with Jana Sena Party, is going all out in its campaign for the by-elections to Tirupati parliamentary seat, scheduled to be held on April 17.
Retired IAS officer K Ratna Prabha, who is contesting as BJP candidate, is meeting all sections of people and travelling all over the constituency extensively.
The campaign by Jana Sena chief and power star Pawan Kalyan a couple of days ago gave a lot of boost to her campaign.
However, the BJP leaders are aware that it is extremely difficult to win the Tirupati by-election, where the YSR Congress party is very strong.
In the last general elections held in April 2019, YSRC candidate Balli Durgaprasada Rao won the seat by securing 7.23 lakh votes accounting for 55 per cent vote share.
TDP candidate Panabaka Lakshmi, who stood second, also won considerable vote share – 4.95 lakh votes, accounting for 37.65 per cent of the total votes polled.
However, BJP candidate Bommi Srihari Rao was at the bottom of the list of recognised political party candidates with just around 16,000 votes, a vote share of 1.22 percent, which is lesser than the votes polled under NOTA (25,781 votes accounting for 1.96 per cent).
Last time, Jana Sena did not contest the election but allotted it to Bahujan Samaj Party candidate D Srihari Rao, who polled nearly 21,000 votes with a vote share of 1.60 per cent.
So, the BJP knows that even if has the support of Jana Sena, it cannot win the seat in the by-elections this time, as going by the last time’s performance, they cannot win more than 42,000 votes, which is around 3.1 percent.
But the saffron party is going all out in the campaign.
According to sources, the main objective of the BJP is not to win the Tirupati seat, but to surpass the Telugu Desam Party in terms of vote share, so as to prove that the BJP-Jana Sena combine is the only alternative to the YSRC.
“Even if Ratna Prabha gets one vote more than Panabaka, the purpose of the BJP is solved. The whole effort is to achieve this objective. If we can succeed in this, we can go ahead with a renewed vigour,” a BJP leader said.
