Legislators defect to TRS; Telangana Opposition to seek judicial intervention

HYDERABAD: Opposition parties in Telangana accuse the Telangana Rashtra Samithi ( TRS) of resuming its unethical practices with renewed vigour days after a landslide victory in Hyderabad municipal polls and of exerting pressure on Opposition lawmakers to shift loyalties towards the ruling party.

Hounded by the 'unprecedented political manoeuvres' of the ruling party in India's newest state, opposition parties are now preparing to knock on the doors of the courts, after failing to elicit favourable response from the speaker of the Legislative Assembly and the governor.

The trigger for the latest panick reaction among the opposition parties was the reported political plot of the TRS to enact more defections and make the turncoat legislators announce merging their respective parties with the ruling party to circumvent the Anti-Defection Law.

A day after its city-based legislator KP Vivekananda Goud joining the ruling party, the TDP suffered another setback on Wednesday evening with its floor leader in Assembly Errabelli Dayakar Rao and city legislator Prakash Goud switching loyalties. This takes the total defectors from the TDP to nine so far.

Reacting to the fresh defections and the plot of the TRS to circumvent the Anti-Defection Law by making the turncoats to announce merger of the party into ruling TRS, the TDP Telangana's Working president A Revanth Reddy told ET:

"The provisions of the Anti-Defection Law do not allow merger resolutions by the defected lawmakers. We will contest the anti-constitutional moves of the ruling TRS in the legal forums if the Assembly Speaker acts in a biased manner." The Congress, which already saw four of its legislators shifting loyalties to the ruling party , is also perturbed over rumours that more of its lawmakers could defect after the party's latest rout in Hyderabad municipal polls.

TRS, the regional party that spearheaded more than a decade-old movement for statehood to Telangana, had won 63 out of 119 Assembly seats in Telangana to capture power in the elections after the bifurcation of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in 2 June, 2014. The TDP, headed by N Chandrababu Naidu, finished third in Telangana with 15 seats. The Congress ended up second with 21 seats.

The ruling TRS now has a strength of 80 members in the Telangana Assembly, up from 63, which the opposition alleges was attained through blatant defections engineered from TDP, Congress, YSR Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party. "The ruling TRS party, led by chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, has been encouraging unethical and unconstitutional defections, setting up unhealthy precedence," accused the Congress' chief official spokesperson Sravan Dasoju.