Malkajgiri: Is Marri using students & parents to gain advantage?

The TRS may have fielded a lesser-known candidate in Malkajgiri against the popular face of Congress - A Revanth Reddy.

HYDERABAD:  The TRS may have fielded a lesser-known candidate in Malkajgiri against the popular face of Congress - A Revanth Reddy. But the pink party nominee Marri Rajashekar Reddy is leaving no stone unturned to win the seat. Reddy is even, allegedly, resorting to using the details of the staff as well as the parents of the students of Marri Lakshma Reddy Institutes, of which is the owner. 

According to sources, Reddy has apparently collected the contact numbers and details of all students and their parents, whose phones are now allegedly being flooded with campaign material seeking votes for Reddy. One individual privy to the process revealed to Express that the TRS candidate has taken contact details of all the students and their parents and the information obtained is now being used to target probable electors. 

Thanks to this process, Reddy seems to be gaining advantage over his competitors, especially the Congress candidate A Revanth Reddy. Considering that even Rajashekar Reddy’s father-in-law and MLA Ch Malla Reddy also owns educational institutions, sources suspect that even data from those colleges are being used in the process. 

Student voters
A party worker explained to Express that the colleges took an initiative to register students as voters and that data is now being used for their advantage. “Malla Reddy and Marri Lakshma Reddy Group of Institutions have applied for voter cards for their students under the colleges and students hostel addresses. The staff are busy in sending text messages and calling students to inform parents and ask them to vote for their chairman,” said a party worker.

Further, he said that Malla Reddy, six months before Assembly elections, gathered the student’s details and applied for voter card using the education institutes address. “Even in the Assembly elections, the votes of staff and students went to Malla Reddy. As the strategy worked, the same is being used for his son-in-law’s success in the Lok Sabha elections,” he said.