BRS has no moral right to speak on defections: Shabbir
Congress senior leader and Advisor to the Telangana Government Mohammed Ali Shabbir has ridiculed BRS leaders' stance regarding the return of Khairtabad MLA Danam Nagender to the Congress fold.
In a media statement on Tuesday, Shabbir Ali stated that former Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao could be crowned as the mastermind behind engineering defections in opposition parties. He reminded that KCR initiated the culture of defection shortly after assuming power in June 2014. Between 2014 and 2018, KCR engineered the defection of 4 MPs, 25 MLAs, and 18 MLCs. Furthermore, in his second term, he engineered the defection of 14 MLAs, including 12 from the Congress party. BRS also made thousands of Sarpanches, ZPTC, MPTC, Councillors, Corporators and other leaders defect to BRS from the then opposition parties.
He pointed out that the
BRS party survived and thrived solely on the basis of defections. "KCR decimated the entire opposition. He could not tolerate any opposition presence in the State. Between March 2 and June 6, 2020, he engineered the defection of 12 Congress MLAs to deprive Dalit leader Bhatti Vikramarka of Leader of Opposition status. Similarly, he induced Congress MLCs to defect to BRS to prevent me, a Muslim leader, from assuming the position of Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Council, despite only one month remaining in my term," he said.
He remarked that BRS leaders had shamelessly filed a disqualification petition against Danam Nagender and demanded Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar take action within three months. He reminded that Talasani Srinivas Yadav, elected on a TDP ticket, was inducted into KCR's cabinet without resigning as MLA from the Sanathnagar constituency. He unlawfully served as a cabinet minister for over a year, and BRS did not consider the implications of the anti-defection law. However, the same BRS leaders are preaching morality on defections and expecting everyone to act ethically. "If an MLA joining the ruling party for the development of his constituency and people was right during the BRS regime, how did it become wrong under the Congress regime?" he asked. Nevertheless, he stressed that Congress does not believe in flouting laws and would never engage in anything unconstitutional.