Hyderabad, March 18: Former MP YS Jagan Mohan Reddy has come a cropper in the election of MLCs by MLAs. After his Delhi rhetoric that the State government was at his mercy, the late YSR’s son could not defeat even a single Congress nominee in the election on Thursday.
In contrast, Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy scored a major victory by helping the Congress pocket five seats though its numbers favoured only four. This apart, he helped his allies, MIM and the PRP, win one seat each.
After protracted deliberations with his group of MLAs on Wednesday and this morning, all that Jagan proved at the end of the day was that his loyalists do not number more than 10 contrary to the impression that he had about 25 MLAs in his camp.
A cursory glance at the polling pattern better explains the fact. Congress candidate Mohammad Jani, to whom 27 MLAs were assigned — a majority of them Jagan loyalists –, polled 17 votes as against the requisite 27. It indicates that 10 MLAs did not vote for him. MIM’s Altaf Hyder Razvi polled 36 votes, nine more than necessary.
From where did he get these votes? It is possible that some Jagan loyalist MLAs may have boosted his majority. The crucial fact, though, is that of the 27 MLAs assigned to Jani, 17 did vote for him despite the fact that Jagan held lengthy parleys with his MLAs and finalised the strategy to ensure the defeat of the Congress nominee.
As if adding insult to injury, Jani won the election since Kiran Kumar Reddy took enough care to ensure that a majority of the second preference votes of legislators go in his favour. That Jagan lacked confidence in rocking the Congress boat was quite apparent from the beginning. At one point of time, he said he was not interested in elections to the council and that he was giving freedom to his MLAs to vote as they deemed fit. But he held prolonged meetings hours before the polling was to begin __ which meant Jagan’s direction to his MLAs to vote according to their conscience was for public consumption. At the meeting, it was more or less decided that all his MLAs should vote for the MIM candidate.
As it turned out, they did not.
As far as TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu is concerned, his strategy to derive maximum benefit from cross-voting in the Congress worked. He has almost succeeded but for Pratibha Bharati who lost in the end. According to sources, the TDP MLAs voted exactly as directed by Naidu and helped the party win two seats and the CPI one. Pratibha Bharati polled more number of votes (21) than Jani (17) but in subsequent rounds, she lost and Jani won because MLAs of the ruling party who are more in number had cast their second preference votes for Jani.
–Agencies