Jagga Reddy to join TRS, sends Congress into tailspin

HYDERABAD: With yet another Congress MLA, T Jayaprakash Reddy from Sangareddy, set to join the TRS, and four more waiting in the wings, MLA count in the ruling party is set to cross the 100-member mark.
Jayaprakash Reddy, popularly known as Jagga Reddy, has gone incommunicado for the Congress leaders and will be joining the TRS soon. He held a meeting with his close aides and supporters in Sangareddy on Saturday and informed them about his plans to join the TRS.Jagga Reddy will meet chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and is likely to join the ruling party on or before March 19.
Jagga Reddy has been praising CM KCR and TRS working president KT Rama Rao for the last one month. On the other hand, Jagga Reddy has been targeting attacks at former irrigation minister T Harish Rao over meting out injustice to Sanga Reddy by diverting water from the Singur dam. While Jagga Reddy was not available for comments, leaders close to him said he will be joining TRS for development of his Assembly constituency.
The buzz in the political circles is that four more Congress MLAs, J Surender from Yellareddy, Harshvardhan Reddy from Kollapur, Podem Veeraiah from Bhadrachalam and G Venkatramana Reddy from Bhupalpally would soon switch over to the ruling party although they have maintained that it is not true.
The TRS won 88 Assembly seats in the December-2018 polls. Subsequently, one independent MLA from Ramagundam and another from Wyra joined the TRS taking its count to 90.
In the last 15 days, 7 Congress MLAs and one from the TDP have announced that they would be joining the TRS. This has taken the count of MLAs on the TRS side to 98. If five more MLAs from the Congress including Jagga Reddy join TRS, the total number of MLAs on the TRS side would be 103. Apart from them, the TRS is trying to lure TDP MLA from Aswaraopet M Nageshwar Rao too.
“The TRS needs just 12 Congress MLAs to render the anti-defection law irrelevant and merge the Congress legislature party (CLP) into the TRS. In such a case, there will be two options before CM KCR—one is to allow merger of CLP into TRS, and the second option would be that the Congress MLAs will resign and seek re-election on TRS ticket. As we all know CM KCR, he would think of the second option only if TRS sweeps all the 17 Lok Sabha seats along with MIM by huge margins,” said political observer K Nageshwar.