New Delhi:

Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy predicted that the BJP would struggle to win over South Indian voters and win less than 15 of the region’s 130 Lok Sabha seats.

Ahead of the 2024 general elections, the BJP is going all out to expand its influence in the southern states, with a special focus on Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made more than a dozen visits to these states in the past few weeks to drum up support.

Ravensh Reddy told New Delhi TV that such support was unlikely.

Mr Reddy, who led his party to a statement victory over the RSS and Janata Dal in last year’s parliamentary elections, told New Delhi TV he expected the Indian bloc to get between 115 and 120 seats out of the 130 seats it would have won. A huge push aimed at defeating the Prime Minister’s party.

“There are 130 seats in the southern region…BJP will get 12-15 seats. The remaining seats will be won by India,” Mr Reddy said in a speech for Congress MP Adore Prakash in Attingal, Kerala. Adoor Prakash told New Delhi TV during the campaign.

Mr. Prakash is the sitting MP; he won the seat from Athampath of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who won the seat after the 2009 and 2014 elections. Like most other seats in the state, Attingal alternates between the Congress and the Communist Party of India, with the BJP usually finishing third.

In fact, Modi’s party has never won a Lok Sabha seat in the state and has won just one assembly seat in the past two state polls despite contesting nearly 180 constituencies in that time.

Mr. Reddy is confident that India will win all 20 Lok Sabha seats in Kerala. “…This time, I don’t think the BJP can even get back its deposit from the seats it contested from,” the Telangana chief minister claimed.

In the 2019 elections, the Congress and its allies (then under the umbrella of the United Progressive Alliance) swept the state cleanly. The BJP can only point to the slight increase in vote share as positive.

This time, however, Kerala will see the two largest members of the group – the ruling Communist Party of India and the Congress – fail to agree on a seat-sharing deal and will therefore compete against each other and against the BJP.

Read | Tamil Nadu battleground: Without a major ally, will the Modi factor come into play?

In Telangana, Mr Reddy believes India will get 14 of the state’s 17 seats.

Last year, the Congress won 64 of the state’s 119 seats, defeating former chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao’s BRS and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Allied CPIM also received a copy. The BRS won just 39 seats – down from 88 seats in the last election – while the BJP won just eight of the 111 contested seats.

The BJP has announced a “Mission South” to try to achieve its target of 400 seats in this election.

The party needs a strong performance in the southern states, which also include Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and the Union Territory of Puducherry. In the last elections, the party suffered heavy defeats in Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. It has won just four games in Telangana.

Read | In Karnataka, BJP battle could derail party’s ‘Mission South’ plan

The only state with the highest score was Karnataka, which secured 25 out of 28 seats

The BJP must perform better if it wants to achieve its personal target of 370.

Mr Reddy believes this will not happen.

in his rival’syour time400 a pair‘ The slogan, he said, “is very similar to what KCR did for campaigning (in the 2023 elections). He claimed that he would get 100 seats but ended up getting 39. This is similar to what the BJP is doing now ‘s very similar… trying to confuse people, but voters will teach the BJP a lesson,” he told New Delhi TV.

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