Hyderabad, March 18: Despite cross-voting by MLAs loyal to former Kadapa MP YS Jagan Mohan Reddy in MLC elections (MLAs’ quota), chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy on Thursday managed to ensure the victory of all the Congress’ five candidates and helped allies MIM and PRP win one seat each.
At the end, TDP’s Pratibha Bharati and TRS’ Mahaboob Ali lost in the race.
For 10 MLCs seats, there were 12 candidates in the fray. The Congress fielded five, PRP and MIM one each, the TDP three, CPI and TRS one each. The total number of valid votes polled was 293.
The Congress has enough strength to win four seats while the TDP has numbers to win only three seats but still, it has also pledged support to the CPI candidate.
After the counting of first preference votes, Congress nominees Paladugu Venkata Rao (Krishna), B Chengal Rayudu (Kadapa) M Ranga Reddy (Hyderabad) and M Sudhakar Babu (Kurnool) won by polling 27 votes each — the number required for one to be elected. MIM’s Syed Altaf Hyder Razvi polled 36 votes and PRP’s Ramachandraiah 26, one less than the required majority. But he made it up in the second preference votes.
Mohammad Jani, who polled only 17 votes at the end of counting of first preference votes, subsequently improved his tally and finally came out with a thumbs up sign.
As far as Ranga Reddy is concerned, he believes that apart from the MLAs loyal to the party, others (read Jagan Mohan Reddy MLAs) too might have voted for him.
At the end of first round of counting of first preference votes, it became clear that at least 9 Jagan MLAs who were directed by the party to vote for Mohammad Jani did not care for the diktat and cast their votes for Razvi. The chief minister allotted 27 Congress MLAs (YS Jagan loyalists) to Jani in the belief that they would not defy the party line since the candidate belongs to the Muslim community. But Jagan voters found in Razvi a better candidate and thus took out on the Congress.
The TRS, which has fielded Mahmood Ali, polled 11 votes. With BJP leader G Kishan Reddy stating that the two BJP votes had been cast for the TRS, the question arose as to where did two votes of the TRS go? The BJP leader maintained that his party had honoured the promise made to the TRS and suspected that two TRS MLAs may have voted against their own party man. “Where did the two TRS votes go? I swear our two votes went in favour of TRS,” said Kishan Reddy.
–Agencies