The weeks of campaigning undertaken by the TRS seem to have paid off as the ruling party has been able to pocket both the MLC seats in the graduates' constituencies of Warangal-Nalgonda-Khammam and Hyderabad-Mahabubnagar-Rangareddy.
After Surabhi Vani Devi was declared
the winner of the much-coveted Hyderabad-Mahabubnagar-Rangareddy seat last evening, the counting officials declared that the party's other candidate, incumbent MLC of the Warangal-Nalgonda-Khammam constituency had also beat his contenders for the seat with a whopping 1,61,811 votes. They announced the results at about 11:00 pm last night after a rather
long counting process.
With this, the MLC, whose term was to end on March 31, has been able to successfully retain his seat for another term. He secured his victory over the other leaders vying for the seat with a lead of 12,806 votes.
Although Reddy had maintained a lead since the first round of counting, independent candidate Teenmar Mallana, with his 1,49,005 votes, put up a tough fight against the former. TJS founder M Kodandaram came in at third place with over 70,000 votes. However, he was eliminated in the 70th round of counting, after which Reddy gained 29,128 votes while Mallana gained 40,901 second preference votes from his ballots.
Though his win should have been a happy occasion, Reddy's big day was slightly marred by a press conference that Mallana held at about 10:00 pm last night, in which he alleged that though the graduates of the constituency had done their democratic duty, "fake votes" and "election-time spendings of Rs 100 crore" had helped Reddy retain his seat.
The declaration of the results also triggered a rather unfortunate event - upset over Mallana's defeat, a 27-year-old youth from Nalgonda, identified as Srisailam, committed suicide yesterday. The youngster, who had reportedly campaigned on the journalist-turned-politician's behalf, was unable to digest the fact that the latter had lost the elections.