Newsmaker | At centre of Telangana SSC leak storm, Bandi Sanjay Kumar KCR’s formidable rival

Like many in the BJP, he was an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) leader in his student days and was appointed the organisation’s Karimnagar president. Rising through the ranks, he became ABVP’s national secretary and even accompanied BJP leader L K Advani for several days during a Rath Yatra in 1996. He was also the Karimnagar municipal corporator twice and was known for his pro-Hindu speeches.

Kumar contested the 2014 and 2018 Assembly elections but lost to candidates of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), as the KCR-led party was known in its earlier avatar. In an attempt to bolster his political career, which had by this point come to a dead end, Kumar hit the ground running after the 2018 loss by holding meetings with people in his district. The work paid off. Riding on a pro-Narendra Modi wave, Kumar defeated the TRS’s B Vinod in the 2019 general elections.

BJP leaders told The Indian Express that the party formulated a recalibration strategy after it won just one out of the 119 seats in the 2018 Assembly elections. It felt that “some of the senior BJP leaders in the state were too soft” and started “looking for someone with a big Hindu appeal”. The 2019 win gave Kumar a leg-up in this regard, but the party weighed the pros and cons for nearly 10 months before appointing him as state president in March 2020.

Kumar is known to intersperse his speeches, which are usually about appeasement politics, with his take on poverty and the BRS. A friend of Kumar’s from the Karimnagar BJP unit remarked that his “ripostes and quips were similar to KCR”.

His aggressive stance was on display during the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections in December 2020 in which the BJP sprang a surprise by winning 48 of 150 seats. Under his leadership, the party won two crucial Assembly bypolls in the Huzurabad and Dubbaka seats. However, the party lost the Munugode bypoll to the BRS last October.

To protest against what he calls the “BRS government’s failures”, Kumar launched a statewide Praja Sangram Yatra on August 28, 2021. In the five phases since then, Kumar has covered nearly 60 Assembly constituencies and has walked over 1,500 km in 120 days.

While his first phase was relatively subdued, the second phase in April 2022 drew a lot more crowds. It concluded on May 14 that year with a public meeting addressed by Union Home Minister Amit Shah who showered praises on Kumar at the meeting. The same day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him to congratulate him on the success of the foot march. The forthcoming sixth phase will be a little different with Kumar and the BJP’s central leadership deciding to go in different directions in modified campaign vehicles.

He is said to have caught the eye of Modi and Amit Shah after successfully organising a massive public meeting in September last year to celebrate the Telangana Integration Day. With senior leaders such as party president J P Nadda backing him, the party seems to be banking on Kumar to lead the BJP in the coming Assembly elections in Telangana. But a state BJP leader said he was “not sure of Kumar’s leadership qualities”, adding that “Kumar prefers to go alone and remains reserved”.

At large rallies, the state BJP chief often draws a parallel between his foot march and former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajashekar Reddy’s padayatra that he undertook before he swept to power in 2004. The BJP leader says his focus is on assuring people of “Neellu (water), Nidhanalu (funds), and Niyamakalu (jobs)” and accuses the BRS of corruption.