Renuka Chowdhury, Others Sore At Congress First List

Congress senior leader and former union minister Renuka Chowdhury today expressed her dissatisfaction with the first list of candidates released by the Congress for the upcoming Telangana Assembly elections to be held on December 7.

Speaking to mediapersons in Hyderabad, Chowdhury said that she failed to understand who had finalised the list.

Expressing dismay over the fact that no seat was allotted to the Kamma community, she stated that none of the important social groups was given the appropriate weightage in the list.

She also expressed shock over the absence of Ponnala Lakshmaiah's name in the list.

Separately, former Serilingampally MLA M Bikshapati Yadav, who had been demanding a ticket for the constituency again, announced that he would contest from Serilingampally as an independent if the high command failed to revise its decision to allocate the seat to grand alliance partner the TDP (as part of the seat-sharing agreement, the Congress allocated 14 seats to the TDP, 8 to the TJS and three to the CPI, keeping 94 of the 119 to itself).

Yadav claimed that at the behest of the party high command, he had started his election campaigning in the constituency a month back.

"How can the high command do this to me? Announcing now that the seat will be allotted to the TDP as part of the grand alliance seat-sharing arrangement is grossly unfair to my supporters and me," he said.