As expected, three members of the Telangana state legislative council who defected from Telangana Rashtra Samithi to Congress before recent assembly elections were disqualified on Wednesday.
A bulletin to this effect was released by legislative council chairman K Swamy Goud in the afternoon. The disqualified MLCs are: R Bhupati Reddy, Yadava Reddy and Ramulu Naik.
The decision followed a petition submitted by TRS leaders Paturi Sudhakar Reddy and Palla Rajeshwar Reddy to Swamy Goud last month. They alleged that the MLCs had shifted loyalties only to further their self-interests.
While the TRS leaders complained against four MLCs who defected to the TRS, the council chairman disqualified three MLCs, while fourth MLC Konda Murali had already resigned from his council membership and it was accepted immediately.
The hurried disqualification without even taking into consideration the appeals made by the three MLCs was taken apparently to facilitate TRS president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao to fill up the vacancies arising out of their disqualification with his own party leaders at the earliest.
The obvious question is why the same rule of disqualification was not applied to the Congress and Telugu Desam Party legislators who had defected to the TRS earlier.
For example, four Congress MLCs –Akula Lalitha, Santosh Kumar, M S Prabhakar and K Damodar Reddy also defected to the TRS, but they were not disqualified.
They gave a letter saying they were merging the Congress Legislature Party of the council and resolved to merge it with the TRS legislature party.
Accordingly, they wanted the council chairman to acknowledge them as TRS MLCs. And within a few hours, the council chairman acknowledged their merger!
