After High Court, desperate BRS turns to President to ‘put an end to poaching’

The BRS has also moved the Telangana High Court against the defections.

In the latest blow for the BRS, Gadwal MLA Bandla Krishna Mohan Reddy joined the Congress on Sunday, making him the seventh legislator after Pocharam Srinivas Reddy (Banswada), Danam Nagender (Khairatabad), Kadiyam Srihari (Station Ghanpur), Kale Yadaiah (Chevella), Tellam Venkat Rao (Bhadrachalam) and Sanjay Kumar (Jagtiyal) to switch loyalties after the Assembly polls, bringing its tally down from 39 to 32 in the Assembly. Nagender even unsuccessfully contested the recent Lok Sabha polls as a Congress nominee from Secunderabad against the BJP’s G Kishan Reddy.

Last week, BRS Rajya Sabha MP K Kesava Rao joined the Congress, followed a day later by six MLCs – Dande Vittal, T Bhanuprasad Rao, Boggarapu Dayanand, M S Prabhakar Rao, Yegge Mallesham and Basavaraju Saraiah – who switched loyalties in a midnight move.

Ahead of the recent Lok Sabha polls, where the BRS failed to open its account, the party had lost four sitting MPs – Venkatesh Borlakunta (Peddapalli), Ranjit Reddy (Chevella), P Ramesh (Nagarkurnool) and B B Patil (Zahirabad) – to the Congress and BJP.

KTR claimed the Congress’ “poaching” was in contravention of the anti-defection law. “The Congress has no moral grounds to poach members of other parties as it has accused the BJP of indulging in similar practices in other states. Rahul Gandhi had waxed eloquent about defections affecting the Congress and even made some of his legislators take anti-defection oaths. What moral ground does he have to allow his party engineer defections of our MLAs?” KTR said.

KTR also trained guns on Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who had spoken about “poaching” of his MLAs. “Siddaramaiah said the going rate for an MLA was Rs 50 crore. I want to ask him how much is the going rate in Telangana, where the Congress has lured members of our party,” he said.

Incidentally, after the 2018 Assembly elections, when the BRS had won 88 of the state’s 119 seats, a host of Congress MLAs had switched loyalties to the party. Asked why the BRS (then the TRS) had not cried foul then, KTR said, “There is a difference between defection and merger. If two-thirds of a party wants to join another party, then defection laws do not apply. But if individual members join another party, the defection law applies. In the case of BRS leaders joining the Congress, defection laws apply.”

Interestingly, none of the MLAs who have jumped ship have resigned from the Assembly.