The Congress leaders reached out to him with an offer of tickets to his nominees for the Assembly seats in the Khammam district.
Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy. (Twitter)
It is more than likely that former MP Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy will not join the BJP.
Srinivas Reddy, who had fallen from grace in the BRS and was suspended for anti-party activities on 10 April, has been racking his brains as to which party he should join — with both the Congress and the BJP going all out to woo him for his clout in Khammam and neighbouring districts.
These days his daily routine is to expose the administration of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and to vent out his spleen against the BRS chief for letting him down when he was in the party.
On Monday, 29 May, he organised a major “job mela” in Khammam where tore into the chief minister, popularly known as KCR.
“KCR has broken his promise of providing one job in each household which he made during the heady days of the Telangana movement,” Srinivas Reddy thundered.
“Nine years have gone by, but the promise remained unfulfilled,” he added, and alleged that the chief minister deliberately had the question papers of the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) recruitment exams leaked to benefit the men in pink.
After the Congress rose like a phoenix in Karnataka decimating BJP, Srinivas Reddy appears to have experienced the first stirrings of hope that the grand old party, after all, may be the right choice over the BJP, which has very thin presence in the Khammam district, from where he hails.
Even the BJP delegation, led by the party’s Joinings Committee chairman Eatala Rajender, who is very persuasive in convincing others, appears to have thrown up its hands in an expression of helplessness over luring the businessman-cum-politician Ponguleti to the saffron party.
Rajender met him and another suspended BRS leader from Mahabubnagar district, J Krishna Rao, twice and tried to make him see the reason for joining the BJP, but he could not cut much ice with him.
It seems there were instances when Ponguleti had tried to counsel him to join his band to fight KCR.
In a chat with media persons at a hotel in Hyderabad, Rajender said the Congress was strong in Khammam but the BJP was not.
“I am speaking to them on a daily basis but both Reddy and Rao were doing reverse counselling to me,” he said.
He said he stopped the two former BRS leaders from joining the Congress.
“They (Reddy and Rao) have certain difficulties in joining the BJP as several people in the Khammam district are still having Communist ideology,” he said.
The Congress leaders, too, reached out to Ponguleti, a man of considerable resources, with an offer of tickets to his nominees for the Assembly seats in the Khammam district.
It was from where the Congress candidates defected to the BRS after winning in the 2018 elections. He was also offered a ticket for the lone seat in Khammam from where Transport Minister Puvvada Ajay Kumar won on a BRS ticket.
Of the 10 seats in the Khammam district, the Congress had won seven seats, TDP two, and BRS only one. Of the seven Congress MLAs, only two are in the party now, with the remaining five having defected to the BRS.
The two TDP MLAs too are trying to ensconce themselves in the BRS camp.
As the BJP is institutionally weak there, the only option open before him is the Congress.
Srinivas Reddy, a protegee of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, was originally from the YSRCP stock. As YSRCP is a party that had emerged from the Congress, he might find it easy to acclimatise in the grand old party.
Srinivas Reddy is seething inwardly with rage against Chief Minister KCR for “letting him down”.
He won election to Lok Sabha in 2014 from Khammam on a YSRCP ticket and later switched his loyalty to TRS (now BRS). But his political growth has remained stunted given that he is a man of ambition and carries his ego on his sleeve.
When elections arrived in 2018, he expected that KCR would field him to the Assembly from Palair.
When that did not happen, he thought he might be sent to Rajya Sabha; this, too, did not happen.
The chasm between the two began widening and reached a tipping point. He began making comments against KCR’s style of functioning.
Soon he became a persona non grata in the BRS. One fine morning, KCR thought enough was enough and suspended him from the party.
KCR would have probably got along with Ponguleti had he remained meek and submissive. On the contrary, he is aggressive, assertive and ambitious.
He has his flock of leaders in the district who have pledged their fealty more to him than to KCR. He is in the habit of holding meetings rivalling BRS meetings. And he grooms the entire district with care.
After being thrown out of the BRS, he organised several Athmeeya Sammelans, whose patent lay with the BRS.
Khammam politics is dominated by Kammas, a successful and enterprising community that has spread to all parts of Andhra Pradesh.
Transport Minister Puvvada Ajay Kumar, former minister Thummala Nageswara Rao and Khammam MP Nama Nageswara Rao, all in the BRS and all from the region, belong to this community.
Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy remains a force here despite being a Reddy because of his proximity to Andhra Chief Minister Jagan, and the resources he is able to deploy in politics.
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