The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday emerged as a big gainer in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls, bagging 48 seats against the 4 seats it had won in 2016. The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) won 55, the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM won 44, and the Congress 2.

Talking about the polls, Telangana minister KT Rama Rao said: “I thank people of Hyderabad who chose TRS as the single largest party to represent them in Council. Result is certainly not what we expected, we’re short of 20-25 seats. We lost about 10-12 divisions with extremely narrow margin. 

Counting of one out of the 149 divisions was rescheduled by the court. The date of the rescheduled counting is yet to be announced. 

Home Minister and BJP leader Amit Shah, in a Twitter post, expressed his gratitude towards Telangana voters for the remarkable victory.

The BJP, in initial trends had shown big gains and looked set to win the polls to the 150 ward GHMC but was unable to build on its initial leads with the ruling TRS catching up to upset the saffron party’s dreams of capturing the civic body.

Despite the setback, the performance of the BJP, which gave a tough fight to the TRS, is a massive improvement against its 2016 show of winning just four seats, that too in alliance with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). For TRS, it is a big setback considering its stupendous performance in the previous municipal polls when it swept the wards.

With this the saffron party has got a toe hold on the electoral stage of Telangana, prompting Tamil Nadu BJP leader Khushbu Sundar, who joined the party in October, to tweet, “We have found our foothold in making a deep impact in South India. Victory in Hyderabad is a proof to that. And let me assure you, #TN is not far. #2021elections we will make a grand entry into TN.”

The Hyderabad municipal polls saw a deeply polarised and high decibel campaign with senior BJP leaders Amit Shah, JP Nadda and Yogi Adityanath campaigning for the party. The saffron party also pitched the demand for renaming Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar after the famed Bhagyalakshmi temple near Charminar.

The polls, a three-way battle between the TRS, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and BJP, saw an unimpressive 46.55 % turnout. Out of the 74.67 lakh voters, 34.50 lakh electors exercised their franchise.

While the ruling TRS fielded candidates in all the 150 wards, BJP set up nominees in 149 of them. The Congress, AIMIM and TDP fielded candidates in 146, 51 and 106 wards respectively.