In a rude shock to the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of its national executive committee meetings in Hyderabad amidst a lot of fanfare, four of its corporators in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation defected to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi on Thursday.
Four corporators – Banothu Sujatha Naik from Hastinapuram, Archana Prakash from Rajendranagar, Derangula Venkatesh from Jubilee Hills and Sunitha Prakash Goud from Adikmet – joined the TRS at Telangana Bhavan in the presence of party working president and state IT minister K T Rama Rao.
Apart from these four, BJP floor leader in Tandur municipality Sindhuja Goud and councillor Asif also joined the TRS in the presence of KTR.
TRS MP from Chevella P Ranjith Reddy and MLAs Maganti Gopinath, Danam Nagender, Pilot Rohit Reddy and P Sudhir Reddy were also present at the time of joining.
Interestingly, all the four BJP corporators in GHMC were part of the 47 members’ delegation which met Prime Minister Narendra Modi only recently and posed for a photograph. They spoke very high of Narendra Modi in Delhi.
The sudden decision of the corporators took the BJP by shock and surprise, at a time when the party cadre and leaders are on cloud nine with the arrival of party bigwigs including Modi, Amit Shah and Nadda to Hyderabad for the national executive committee meeting.
The defections were also a challenge to BJP state president Bandi Sanjay, who was trying to project himself as the prospective CM candidate. Who is behind these defections and what was the bargaining is yet to come out.
With the latest defections, the strength of the TRS in 150-member GHMC has gone up to 60 and that of the BJP has come down to 44.