TRS wins five seats in Telangana council

Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Kadiam Srihari and minister T. Venkateshwar Rao were among five candidates of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) elected to the state legislative council.

B. Venkateshwar, N. Vidyasagar and K. Yadav Reddy of TRS were also declared elected.

Main opposition Congress' Akula Lalitha was also elected, while the Telugu Desam Party-Bharatiya Janata Party candidate was defeated in the elections held on Monday.

The election commission announced the results Monday evening.

Out of the 120-member Telangana legislative assembly, 118 lawmakers voted to elect six members to the council, while the sole members of the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India-Marxist did not participate in the election.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, his cabinet colleagues, and opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) legislator A. Revanth Reddy, who was arrested for trying to bribe a nominated legislator, were among the legislators who exercised their franchise.

Speaker S. Madhusudana Chary was among the first to cast their votes.

The polling began at 9 a.m. and continued till 4 p.m. The counting of votes was taken up at 5 p.m.

The election was marred by the dramatic arrest of Revanth on Sunday night for allegedly trying to bribe a nominated MLA to make him vote for a TDP-BJP candidate.

Revanth, who was sent to judicial custody for 14 days by a magistrate on Monday morning, was allowed to cast his vote in accordance with the magistrate's orders. Police brought him amid tight security to the assembly building for voting, before shifting him to Chanchalguda Central Jail.

In the 120-member assembly, the TRS had sufficient numbers to win four seats but also bagged the fifth seat with the support of defectors from the opposition parties and also the backing of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) and YSR Congress party.

The TRS, which won 63 seats in last year's assembly elections, increased its strength to 76 with 13 members from opposition parties defecting to it. With a nominated member from the Anglo-Indian community, the TRS tally has reached 77. It also has support of seven members of the MIM and one member of the YSR Congress.

With just 15 members, the TDP-BJP combine was not in a position to win any seat. The TRS went all out to deny a win to its bitter rival TDP. Only two days before the polling, TDP legislator Krishna Rao joined the TRS. He was the fifth TDP lawmaker to defect during last one year.

The TRS has also lured four members of the Congress, two each of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the YSR Congress during last one year.