Call it confidence or overconfidence, Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) president and former Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao was of firm hope that his party would score a hattrick in the recent assembly elections again and he would be the chief minister for the third successive term.
There were reports in the media that a day before the counting of votes, KCR even asked his party leaders and cadres to make preparations for massive victory celebrations across the state. His son K T Rama Rao rubbished the exit poll results as silly, stupid and lacked credibility.
Now, yet another interesting development has come to light that showed how much confident KCR was in returning to power for the third time.
Apparently, the BRS president had purchased as many as 22 Land Cruiser vehicles and kept them ready for use, once he came to power again.
This was disclosed by none other than new Congress chief minister A Revanth Reddy.
He told reports that after he assumed charge as the chief minister, he had instructed the officials not to procure new vehicles for him.
“I had directed officials to refurbish existing vehicles for my use. However, the officials told me that the previous KCR government had acquired 22 Land Cruisers and stored them in Vijayawada,” he said.
Apparently, the intention was to bring them once KCR returned to power and assumed charge.
“But the “daridram” (misfortune) was hanging on his head and he lost power. I was unaware of this until 10 days into my tenure,” he said.
The chief minister lashed out at KTR and another former minister T Harish Rao saying that they had created huge assets.
“They have, in fact, demolished old structures to build new ones; and are now claiming that they have created assets,” he criticised.
Revanth wondered whether the chief minister of a state needed so many vehicles, when there were already hundreds of vehicles at his disposal.
“Each vehicle costs around Rs 3 crore and if they are converted into bullet-proof, they require additional expenditure. These are the assets created by KCR,” he said, added that his government would recall all those vehicles and put them to proper use, as they were bought with public money.