K Chandrasekhar Rao plans to ensure Congress loses LoP post

Hyderabad: TRS president and Telangana state Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao seems to be working on more defections from the Congress to ensure that the party is deprived of the Leader of Opposition status when the Assembly meets after the Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress has already lost its Opposition status in the Telangana Legislative Council soon after the election results in December 2018, when the TRS engineered several defections.

Sources in the TRS say that defections of MLAs from the Congress will not stop with the two Congress MLAs Atram Sakku and Rega Kantha Rao announcing on Saturday that they were joining the TRS.

It is only the beginning and in coming days there will be more defections.

On the day Assembly election results were announced on December 7, 2018, Mr Rao told reporters that with the debacle of the Prajakutami, many senior MLAs who had won were worried and had made contact with him and expressed their desire to join the TRS. The CM has not revealed the names of these persons even to his confidants.

Five Congress MLAs from North Telangana districts and four MLAs from South Telangana districts are said to be in touch with the Chief Minister. There is speculation that a Congress woman MLA will be taken into the Cabinet soon after her entry into the TRS.

The Congress won 10 seats in North Telangana and nine seats in South Telangana in December. With Atram Sakku and Rega Kantha Rao quitting the Congress, the party’s strength in the House is now 17. Seven more MLAs need to defect to the TRS if the Congress is to be denied the status of the main Opposition party in the House.

The Congress enjoys that status now as it has more than one-tenth of the MLAs. Senior Congress MLA M. Bhatti Vikramarka is currently the Leader of the Oppo-sition in the Telangana Legislative Assembly.

It may be recalled that the Congress had lost its status as the main Opposition party in the State Legislative Council soon after the Assembly elections.

The election results were announced on December 11, 2018, and on December 21, four Congress MLCs — M.S. Prabhakar Rao, T. Santo-sh Kumar, K. Damodar Reddy and Akula Lalitha — met the Telangana State Legislative Council Chairman Swamy Goud and petitioned him to “merge” them with the TRS.

The very next day, December 22, the Chairman issued a notification merging the four members with the TRS, and another notification cancelling the recognition of Mohammed Ali Shabbir as Leader of Opposition in the Council.

TRS leaders are expecting something similar in the Assembly soon after the parliamentary elections.