Congress to field candidate in Rajya Sabha poll to ‘expose’ TRS

HYDERABAD: Even though it does not have enough strength of legislators to win even one of the three seats in the Rajya Sabha election, the Congress has decided to field a candidate in the biennial election from the state scheduled for March 23.

“Though our party has no sufficient numbers in the state Assembly, we have decided to field our candidate in the poll to expose the seven turncoats who defected to the ruling TRS from our party. By doing so, we will expose the immoral act of the ruling party which indiscriminately engineered defections from other parties into it, making a mockery of democracy,” Congress MLA SA Sampath Kumar said here on Friday after the Congress Legislature Party met under the chairmanship of K Jana Reddy.   

The Congress had won 21 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections. Of them, seven crossed over to the ruling party later. Any candidate who wants to be in the fray needs the signatures of ten legislators on his or her nomination paper.  As the Congress has still 13 members with it, it can field its own candidate but needs 40 votes to win the seat, which is impossible.

As voting will be in the form of ‘open ballot, every MLA, who exercises his or her franchise, needs to show the ballot paper after casting the vote to the agent of the party to which he or she belongs. That means even the defectors, who crossed over to the TRS from the Congress, will have to show their ballot paper to their party agent before dropping it in the ballot box. Thus, the Congress agent can easily know which MLA voted for which party. “Thus, we can expose the turncoats and the misdeeds of the TRS at the national level,” Sampath Kumar explained.

In the 120-member Assembly (including the nominated legislator), TRS has 89 members including those who defected from the Congress and the TDP.