KCR to call voters and seek votes for TRS candidates in MLC polls

Hyderabad: TRS president and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao will call a few graduate voters over the phone and seek their votes for party candidates fighting the March 14 MLC polls for two seats.

Official sources in TRS said the CM took this decision at the party's MLC election strategy meeting' held with in-charge ministers and senior party leaders on Wednesday. This is for the first time that the CM will be speaking directly to voters over the phone, seeking votes for the TRS in the elections.

The decision came as a surprise to party leaders and cadre who said that it showed the importance being given by the party chief to the MLC polls. In the past, the party never took the MLC elections seriously.

Rao is learnt to have directed ministers and party leaders to provide him with the phone numbers of graduate voters in six districts that are going to the polls. The CM asked them to categorise the voters as graduates, postgraduates, private employees, government employees, women, IT employees, advocates and other professionals and provide their phone numbers accordingly.

The TRS chief said he would select the names of a few voters randomly covering Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Mahbubnagar, Warangal, Khammam and Nalgonda and speak to them directly over the phone, explaining the welfare schemes and development programmes undertaken by the TRS government.

The CM will also counter the claims of the Opposition that TRS failed the youth, students and employees. Sources said he wanted to discuss with voters the high salary hikes and increments he had extended to government employees and the highest-ever filling of 1.32 lakh government jobs in six years.

He wanted to assure the employees and students about the government's plans to implement the new Pay Revision Commission to employees and issuance of job notifications to fill over 50,000 posts soon after the MLC polls.

The CM was spending six to eight hours every day to discuss party's strategy for upcoming MLC polls and Nagarjunasagar Assembly bypoll for the past two weeks. This has boosted the morale of the party leaders and cadre. Party sources say that barring Assembly elections, the CM had never spent this much time on any election in Telangana since 2014 and had, instead, handed over all the election responsibilities to his son K.T. Rama Rao.

However, in the backdrop of the TRS suffering electoral setbacks in the recent Dubbak Assembly bypoll and GHMC elections and the Congress intensifying its activities with padayatras, the CM is learnt to have decided to handle the party strategy for the upcoming elections himself if only to decisively check the growth of the two Opposition parties.