Even as the Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao is getting ready for the dissolution of the state assembly, firebrand MLA from Kodangal and Congress leader A Revanth Reddy submitted his resignation from his assembly membership.
Revanth came to the state assembly building at around 11 am and straightaway went to the chambers of assembly speaker S Madhusudhana Chary and submitted his resignation letter in the prescribed format.
Though Chary refused to meet Revanth, he had dropped the letter in his office and came out, claiming that he had resigned from his MLA post.
The Kodangal MLA, who got elected on the Telugu Desam Party ticket in 2014 assembly elections, defected to the Congress party in November 2017.
He claimed then that he had also resigned from the assembly membership by submitting his resignation letter to TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu. But he did not send a copy of it to the Telangana assembly speaker.
However, Naidu had been sitting over resignation letter since then, instead of forwarding the same to the Telangana speaker. If Revanth directly submitted the letter to Speaker, the latter would have to accept it.
At the same time, the Speaker would also come under pressure to take an action on the petition of the Congress and the TDP, seeking disqualification of their party MLAs defected into the TRS.
Since Naidu had not forwarded his resignation letter to the Speaker, Revanth had been continuing as an MLA since then, enjoying all the benefits.
Now, with the assembly all set to be dissolved in the next couple of hours, the Kodangal MLA dramatically submitted his fresh resignation letter to the Speaker.
This would no way help him politically, but would also get him brickbats from his opponents, as to why he had not done the same in the past.
“It is ridiculous to resign from the assembly membership now, since the House is going to be dissolved even before it is accepted by the Speaker. This is nothing but a high drama,” a senior journalist observed.