‘Conditions apply’ on TRS candidates list
Insiders say Thursday’s list is not final and does not guarantee tickets
A new theory, ‘conditions apply', is doing the rounds in the TRS which is similar to the tag attached to freebies and discounts announced by business houses. This is with regard to allotment of tickets to 105 candidates released by TRS president and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Thursday after the dissolution of the House.
TRS insiders say this list does not guarantee that the same candidates will be in the fray when the elections are held.
They say the party chief will continue to order surveys and take ground-level feedback every week to assess the winning prospects of the candidates and replace them accordingly with ‘winning horses’. Accordingly, signals are being sent to aspirants from the seats to continue their work till Bforms are issued.
The TRS chief has announced tickets for all these sitting MLAs barring two on Friday. This triggered protests from TRS leaders in seats where the sitting MLAs’ performance was not up to the mark and in seats where leaders from other parties defected to the TRS. To pacify them, the TRS leadership has come out with the ‘conditions apply’ theory saying that it has come out with an ‘early list’ only to thwart the defection of sitting MLAs from the TRS into other parties, in case tickets were denied. The ‘real candidates’ would be known only when B-forms are given in the last minute while filing nominations.
Another debate doing the rounds is that the party wants some dissident candidates, who are believed to be strong, to contest as ‘independent candidates’ and come back to the party fold after winning the elections. In this way, the ‘conditions apply’ theory is claimed to be based purely on meeting some ‘conditions’.