Kavitha Wins Nizamabad MLC Seat

TRS MLC candidate Kalvakuntla Kavitha, who filed her nomination for Nizamabad's seat of the Legislative Council seats under the local authorities' quota, was elected unopposed.

According to reports, Kavitha was elected by default as the sole other nomination was rejected by the election authorities due to incorrect details in the affidavit.

While the Congress and the BJP chose not to contest the election for the seat, an independent Srinivas had filed his nomination. However, his nomination was found to be out of order as he had failed to fill in all the correct details as per the procedures, and was rejected.

That led to the TRS candidate being elected unopposed.

The SEC is however yet to announce it officially.

Kavitha had filed four sets of nominations for the seat.

After the news broke, Kavitha extended thanks to the party and people, and vowed to serve the segment.

For the uninitiated, Kavitha is the daughter of the Telangana Chief Minister Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao, and has been an MP previously and is currently an MLC with the same seat. She lost the last Lok Sabha election that she contested, for the Nizamabad Lok Sabha seat in 2019, to Dharmapuri Arvind of the BJP, and KCR had then accommodated her as an MLC, again for Nizamabad (the same local authorities' quota seat that she has won now), in October 2020 when the seat fell vacant due to the disqualification of sitting MLC R Bhupathi Reddy. Her current term expires on Jan 4, 2022, and she will continue since she has (unofficially) won the seat again.

The Telangana Legislative Council has 40 members. Of these, 14 (1/3rd) are elected by the Telangana MLAs, 14 (1/3rd) by the state's local authorities, three (1/12th) by teachers of the state and three (1/12th) by graduates of the state. The remaining six (1/6th) are nominated by the Governor, but it is usually the government that recommends the names for those, too.

Currently, 33 of the 40 seats belong to the TRS, and the AIMIM, a TRS ally, has two. Three MLCs are independents and one more belongs to the Congress, and one seat, under the Governor's quota, is vacant after the Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan declined to approve the nomination of Padi Kaushik Reddy by the TRS (Reddy was eventually made an MLC anyway by KCR under the MLAs' quota).