E-Paper
TRS to support Yashwant Sinha in Presidential polls
At one stage, there was a talk in the TRS that KCR might decide that the party would abstain from voting in the Presidential elections, if the candidate chosen by the opposition was not acceptable to him.
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) will be extending support to former Union minister Yashwant Sinha, who has emerged as the common candidate of the opposition parties in the Presidential elections, to be held in July.
Though the TRS president and Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao was not part of the confabulations of the opposition parties to decide the Presidential candidate, he has decided that the TRS will support Sinha, who had been a bitter critic of the Narendra Modi government for the last few years.
“Yes, we have decided to support the candidature of Sinha,” said a TRS MP, who is a close confidant of the chief minister, on the condition of anonymity .
KCR, as the TRS president is popularly called, abstained from the meeting convened by Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in New Delhi on June 15 on the pretext that he won’t be a party to any discussion that involved the Congress.
Though it was initially believed that he would depute one of the senior party leaders like former MP B Vinod Kumar or TRS secretary general and Rajya Sabha member K Kesava Rao to the meeting, but he changed his idea at the last moment and decided against sending anybody.
Even on Tuesday, the TRS chief neither attended nor sent any of his party leaders to the meeting convened by Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar to finalise the candidate for the Presidential elections on the same ground that the Congress would be attending the meeting.
At one stage, there was a talk in the TRS that KCR might decide that the party would abstain from voting in the Presidential elections, if the candidate chosen by the opposition was not acceptable to him.
“The TRS chief was not happy with the way Mamata Banerjee ignored his request to keep the Congress away during the confabulations to decide on the Presidential candidate,” a senior TRS leader, who refused to be named, said.
However, with the opposition parties finalising Sinha’s name, the chief minister decided to extend support to him, because of the latter’s stature and service to the nation in the capacity of a bureaucrat as well as external affairs minister.
“More than anything else, Sinha has been a bitter critic of Narendra Modi’s economic policies,” a senior TRS leader said on the condition of anonymity.
The TRS has, in all, 24,796 votes accounting for 2.30% of the total electorate in the Presidential elections.
Meanwhile, there was no decision yet from the ruling YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) led by Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, on whom to support in the Presidential elections.
Like his Telangana counterpart, Jagan, too, had skipped the meeting convened by Mamata Banerjee on June 15. But in all probability, the YSRCP might vote for the NDA candidate in view of his friendly relations with the Narendra Modi government.
The YSRCP has 45,550 votes, accounting for 4.22% of the total electorate in the Presidential elections. In the 2017 Presidential elections, both the TRS and YSRCP extended support to NDA candidate Ramnath Kovind.
