12 Defecting Congress MLAs Justify CLP Merger

The 12 Congress MLAs who recently defected to the ruling TRS on Wednesday asserted that their collective decision to merge the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) into the TRS Legislature Party was totally constitutional.

Speaking to mediapersons in Telangana Bhavan today, MLA Rega Kantha Rao said that they all differed with the Congress policies and were fed up with the infighting in the party, and so decided to merge their group into the TRS for the sake of the development of their respective constituencies and the welfare of their constituents.

As there was no future for the Congress in the State with all the internecine fighting and the lack of any capable leadership, they were constrained to merge their legislature party unit into the TRS, they claimed.

They also said that they would file defamation cases against the Congress leadership for trying to malign the image of the TRS and the government.

Atram Sakku, G V Ramana Reddy, Sabitha Indra Reddy, D Sudhir Reddy and others said that they had defected to the ruling party as per democratic norms. "It is with the concurrence of our constituents that we took the decision, and we are yet to take the TRS shawls. There is no meaning in the Congress protests against the defections," they said. "We had a right to defect, and did so following the constitutional process, and there is nothing wrong in it," the leaders claimed.

For the uninitiated, Speaker P Srinivas Reddy recently merged the 12-member team of legislators from the Congress into the TRS Legislature Party since the twelve constituted a two-thirds majority, and the Congress is fighting legally against that.