Telangana Congress party on Monday announced that it was boycotting the elections to five MLCs under assembly constituencies’ quota to be held on Tuesday, in protest against the poaching of its MLAs by the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi.
The Congress party has 19 MLAs in the 119-member assembly and its alliance partner of Maha Kootami – Telugu Desam Party has two MLAs.
As such, it had enough strength to win one MLC seat comfortably, since it requires 21 MLAs to win the seat.
However, the TRS, which had the strength to win only four MLC seats, fielded a fifth candidate as well on behalf of the MIM.
Going by the numerical strength of the MLAs of the TRS and the MIM, it will fall short of seven votes, taking into consideration even the vote of nominated MLA Elvis Stevenson.
In order to win the fifth seat as well, the TRS started poaching the Congress MLAs one after the other.
As of now, four MLAs – Rega Kantha Rao from Pinapaka, Atram Sakku from Asifabad, Chirumarthi Lingaiah from Nekrekal and Haripriya Naik from Yellandu, openly announced that they were supporting the TRS.
Another MLA – former home minister Sabita Indra Reddy from Maheshwaram is also likely to jump the fence into the TRS.
With this, the Congress, which fielded PCC treasurer Gudur Narayan Reddy in the MLC polls, has lost all hopes of winning the seat. So, it has decided to boycott the MLC elections altogether.
“TRS president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao indulged in blatant murder of democratic norms. Despite knowing that the TRS did not have enough numbers to win the fifth seat, it fielded the MIM candidate only with an intention of engineering cross voting from the Congress. This is highly undemocratic,” PCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy said.