Elections 2019 - 6 Scenarios For Election Results Day

With expectations of a hung Parliament in the air, opposition parties are busy calculating the permutations and combinations that would help them form the government. Modi and the BJP, however, may still have the edge

- Soni Mishra, Pratul Sharma And Rahul Devulapalli

K.Chandrashekar Rao is known to be a deeply religious man. So his fiveday family trip to Kerala and Tamil Nadu that began on May 6, with visits to several temples on the itinerary, was hardly out of the way.

But it was not just faith that moved the Telangana chief minister; he had a political agenda as well. That became clear when, after visiting the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, he called on Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to seek the left front’s backing for his proposed federal front of non-BJP, non-Congress parties. On May 13, Rao flew to Chennai after visiting Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in Tiruchirapalli, and met DMK president M.K. Stalin, whom he had been courting for a while. He also called Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy.

The federal front has been Rao’s pet project since March last year. He set about the task with renewed vigour soon after the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha elections ended, sensing that his Telangana Rashtra Samithi would do well in the elections, and that both the BJP and the Congress could fall well short of majority. With the seventh and final phase of the elections just days away, Rao intends to reach out to the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha and the mahagathbandhan of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal in Uttar Pradesh.