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Telangana MLC bypoll: KCR’s daughter Kalvakuntla Kavitha files nomination from Nizamabad
Kavitha represented Nizamabad parliamentary constituency between 2014 and 2019, but lost the Lok Sabha elections to BJP’s Dharmapuri Arvind.
Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao’s daughter and former Lok Sabha member Kalvakuntla Kavitha on Wednesday filed her nomination as Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) candidate in the by-poll to the state Legislative Council.
Kavitha filed her papers with the returning officer at Nizamabad district collectorate. She was accompanied by minister for roads and buildings Vemula Prashanth Reddy, several MLAs and other TRS leaders.
In the morning, the TRS president announced Kavitha’s candidature for the by-election, which was necessitated with the disqualification of sitting MLC R Bhupathi Reddy who had defected to the Congress during the December 2018 assembly elections. He challenged his disqualification in the high court, but his petition was dismissed.
The polling will be held on April 7 and the counting will be taken up on April 9. The Congress and the BJP are in the race for the seat.
However, the victory of Kavitha in the MLC election is going to be easy, as the TRS has 592 out of 824 votes in all the mandal (block) parishads and zilla parishads in Nizamabad, whereas the Congress has 142 votes and the BJP has 90 votes.
Kavitha represented Nizamabad parliamentary constituency between 2014 and 2019, but lost the Lok Sabha elections to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Dharmapuri Arvind in 2019 with a margin of over 50,000 votes. Since then, she has been lying low in the party.
According to a TRS leader familiar with the development, there was a talk in the party that Kavitha would be nominated to Rajya Sabha, but she did not evince interest in the same and instead, wanted to play a key role in the state politics. “That could be the reason why KCR has decided to field her for the legislative council elections,” he said.
Once Kavitha gets elected the upper house in the state, there is every possibility that she might be inducted into the state cabinet and given key portfolios so that she could play active role in the party as well as government, the TRS leader quoted above said.
