'Even dogs won't bother about you if you do not vote for TRS': Former minister Tummala Nageswara Rao tells voters

HYDERABAD: In what is a desperate attempt at getting back into the good books of chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, former minister Tummala Nageswara Rao who lost in the December 2018 assembly polls shocked voters during campaigning for the party’s Khammam Lok Sabha candidate with his utterances.


“If the TRS candidate loses even this time, even dogs will not care about you,” Tummala Nageswara Rao said in an emotional speech during electioneering on March 28, campaigning alongside the party’s nominee Nama Nageswara Rao and TRS party general secretary Palla Rajeshwara Reddy. That Palla Rajeshwara Reddy was himself surprised at the utterances of Thummala could be gauged from the way he kept his gaze on him while he spoke.

“I am unable to show my face to KCR. I have never faced such insult in my life because of the debacle in the last elections. I will get back my honour only if you vote for the TRS candidate. Otherwise, even dogs will not bother about you,” he commented.

Tummala Nageswara Rao was roads and buildings minister in the previous TRS government. However, in the 2018 December assembly polls, he lost to K Upendar Rao of the Congress. “The votes you cast last time went down the drain in dirty water,” Thummala said addressing voters during the road show on March 28.

Such was the debacle of the TRS in the assembly polls that it won only one out of 10 seats in Khammam thought it came back to power in Telangana.

“We should have won 10 out of 10. After I joined the TRS, I got people from the TDP, Congress and other parties to join the TRS and took them along with me. I gave them responsibilities. The outcome of the polls was insulting to me. In my decades of public life, this was the first time that I felt so insulted,” he said.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, YSRCP candidate P Srinivas Reddy won the Khammam seat. He later defected to the TRS. With the dismal performance of the TRS in Khammam, TRS president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao chose not to field Srinivas Reddy again. Nama Nageshwara Rao of the TDP was welcomed into the party and fielded as TRS candidate.