Hyderabad: More than a year after losing the parliamentary elections from Nizamabad in May 2019, Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter Kalvakuntla Kavitha on Monday registered a landslide victory at the state legislative council elections, with a thumping majority.
The former MP swept the by-polls to the MLC seat from Nizamabad local bodies constituency with a margin of 672 votes by securing over 88 per cent of votes polled. The bye-elections the MLC seat from Nizamabad local bodies’ constituency were necessitated following the disqualification of sitting MLC R Bhoopathi Reddy from the TRS to the Congress in December last. The polling was held on December 9 and the counting took place on Monday.
Out of 823 votes polled in the constituency, the former MP won 728 votes. In the first round, she secured 531 out of 600 votes and polled another 197 votes in the second round.
Her nearest candidate Lakshmi Narayana of the Bharatiya Janata Party polled only 56 votes, while Subhash Reddy of the Congress could get only 29 polls and another 10 votes were declared invalid. Both the Congress and the BJP candidates lost their deposits.
The by-election to the MLC seat was supposed to be held on April 7 this year but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The polling was recently cleared by the Election Commission of India.
Founder of the cultural organization Telangana Jagruthi, Kavitha played a major role in the Telangana movement alongside her father. She won the parliamentary election from the Nizamabad constituency in 2014. However, in 2019, Kavitha lost to Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Dharmapuri Arvind with a margin of over 70,000 votes. Since then, she had been lying low until she was chosen as the party candidate for the MLC elections from Nizamabad.
Kavitha is now being tipped to be inducted into the cabinet of her father. “There is every possibility that she will become a minister in KCR cabinet. We all wish to see her as a minister soon,” senior TRS leader and lawmaker from Bodhan Mohd Shakeel said.