BJP, Cong. set to field ‘made in BRS’ men

Pink party leaders made LS candidates of parties they joined

The BJP and the Congress may have much to thank their arch rival BRS for in this year’s Lok Sabha elections in Telangana.

And with nominations for the May 13 polling for the elections set to begin on Thursday, the stage is set for nine of the 17 Lok Sabha constituencies where leaders, who were until recently in the BRS, and in some cases turned their party colours on a dime and were made candidates of the parties they joined, take on their former party colleagues.

These political friends turned political foes will face off. if the parties do not make any last-minute changes, in Warangal, Nalgonda, Adilabad, Mahbubabad, Zaheerabad, Chevella, Malkajgiri and Secunderabad constituencies.

While in eight of these constituencies it is a single BRS leader who jumped ship to join either the BJP or the Congress, it is in Warangal that the BRS lost two of its leaders to the other parties.

One of them, Dr Kadiam Kavya, quit the BRS two days after she was declared as the BRS candidate by party president K. Chandrashekar Rao and joined the Congress and was immediately named as its candidate. The second to have jumped the BRS ship is Aroori Ramesh, a former BRS MLA who switched to the BJP and was equally promptly rewarded by the BJP, which declared him as its candidate in Warangal.

The fast developments in Warangal led to some serious consternation in the BRS and its leaders slammed Kavya and her father and senior BRS leader Kadiam Srihari, who too joined the Congress along with his daughter on March 31, and accused them of backstabbing their parent party.

These sudden, but not unexpected, developments forced the BRS to rethink its strategy, and prospects in Warangal and it finally on April 12 named Dr. Marepalli Sudhir Kumar, the Hanamkonda municipal chairman. as its face for the Lok Sabha seat battle in the constituency.

In all, the BRS lost five of its leaders to the BJP, and four to Congress and all these nine got tickets from the parties that they joined.