KCR WINS BY HEAVY MARGIN, CONG DISTANT 2ND IN T’GANA

K Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) won a second straight term in India’s youngest state after scoring a landslide victory in the assembly elections.

The TRS won 88 seats in the 119-member assembly.

The Maha Kootami – the grand alliance of the Congress, Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Telangana Jana Samithi (TJS) – managed to win just 21 seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended up with one seat.

The All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), headed by Asaduddin Owaisi, has retained seven seats, while independent candidates won the remaining three seats.

“We could have won another 17 to 18 seats but for the mistakes committed by our own party leaders,” Rao, better known as KCR, said at a press conference held at Telangana Bhavan in Hyderabad.

The chief minister’s gamble of dissolving the assembly in September and calling early elections paid rich political dividends. While the TRS president retained his Gajwel assembly seat with a margin of 58,290 votes, his son and information technology (IT) minister KT Rama Rao won from Sircilla for the fourth consecutive time with a margin of over 89,000 votes.

Congress supporters celebrate outside the AICC headquarters in Delhi on Tuesday. This was for the first time after Narendra Modi’s coronation as Prime Minister in 2014 that the Congress wrested a state – three in this case – from the BJP. SANJEEV VERMA /HT PHOTO