Shabbir Ali said that KCR had started the culture of defection from the day he came to power in 2014, and continued it till he lost the 2023 Assembly elections.
Senior Congress leader and Advisor to the Telangana Government Mohammed Ali Shabbir today launched a scathing attack on the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) for its stance on political defections.
He accused BRS president and former Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao of initiating the culture of defection in Telangana.
Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan, Shabbir Ali said that KCR had started the culture of defection from the day he came to power in 2014, and continued it till he lost the 2023 Assembly elections.
Citing examples, he said on June 2, 2014, on the day Telangana was officially formed, two BSP MLAs, Indrakaran Reddy and Koneru Konappa, defected to the BRS. On December 16, 2014, Talasani Srinivas Yadav, a TDP MLA, was appointed minister. As per the rules, Srinvas Yadav should have resigned within six months and faced by-elections, but he continued in his position without doing so.
KCR subsequently facilitated the defection of 11 TDP MLAs one after the other, culminating in the official merger of the TDP with the BRS on March 11, 2016. Srinivas Yadav remained a TDP MLA and a TRS Minister for 14 months and 24 days, which Shabbir Ali highlighted as a significant breach of democratic principles.
He said that in all, during KCR's first term (2014-2018), the BRS saw the defection of 4 MPs, 25 MLAs and 18 MLCs to it, totaling 47. In the second term (2018-2023), another 14 MLAs, including 12 from the Congress and two from the TDP, defected to the BRS. Thus, over the past decade, KCR orchestrated the defection of 59 elected representatives, systematically undermining democracy in Telangana by decimating the opposition and fundamentally altering the political landscape in Telangana, Shabbir Ali said.
Shabbir Ali condemned the BRS for now criticising the Congress citing anti-defection laws and morals, labelling it as hypocrisy. He recalled that when the Congress and TDP MLAs had joined BRS, KCR justified it by claiming they were joining the ruling party to develop their constituencies and Telangana. However, now that the BRS members were joining the Congress, he was not using the same logic.
Shabbir Ali claimed that more than 30 of the 39 BRS MLAs were ready to switch to the Congress, which could result in the BRS losing its status as the main opposition party in the coming days. He said that except for KCR's family members, no one would remain in the BRS.
Shabbir Ali also raised serious concerns about the allocation of prime land for the BRS' party offices. He said that the previous KCR government had allocated 11 acres of prime land worth Rs 1,100 crore in Kokapet for just Rs 37 crore for the BRS office. Similar prime lands were allotted for BRS offices in the district headquarters, too, he said. He demanded that the Congress government cancel such allocations and reclaim the lands. He said that the Kokapet land given to the BRS should be auctioned, and its proceeds utilised for the crop loan waiver and Rythu Bharosa schemes.
Shabbir Ali also accused the BJP of attempting to privatise the SCCL, with the auction of coal mines being the first step, and said that the BRS had remained a mute spectator for ten years during which the BJP government systematically damaged SCCL.