“I will see your end. My time will come”. This was Revanth Reddy to K Chandrasekhar Rao, the first chief minister of India’s youngest state, in 2015. Revanth had been arrested after being caught red-handed by the Anti-Corruption Bureau for allegedly offering Rs 50 lakh to a nominated MLC to vote in favour of the candidate of his then party, TDP.
Rewind to 2009. YS Rajasekhara Reddy was the chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh and Telangana seemed a distant dream. Revanth played a key role in persuading KCR to contest from the Mahbubnagar Lok Sabha segment to strengthen Telangana sentiment in the southern part. The TRS supremo heeded, a counsel that Revanth would come to regret later.
Revanth was not yet an MLA in 2009. Back in 2007, the 38-year-old won MLC elections as an independent. YSR is said to have asked him to join the ruling Congress. But Revanth chose the TDP, as he felt an opposition party would offer more scope for a youngster to make a mark — the same feisty nature, the fighting spirit that everyone across the country is now aware of after he dethroned the seemingly invincible KCR and became the second CM of Telangana.
With the ruling TRS (later BRS) decimating the TDP in Telangana, Revanth joined the Congress in 2017 and soon became its working president. After a bitter loss from his Kodangal segment in the 2018 Assembly elections, Revanth soon recovered and won from Malkajgiri, India’s largest Lok Sabha constituency in terms of the number of electors, in the 2019 LS elections.
His rise in the Congress seemed inevitable and Revanth soon became the Telangana PCC chief in June 2021, less than three years after he joined the party. But the victory of Revanth’s Congress in the 2023 state elections was far from inevitable. Just a few months after he became the TPCC chief, the party not only lost its deposit in the Huzurabad bypoll, but its candidate also won just 3,000 votes. And a year down the line, in the Munugode bypoll, the party again lost its deposit with the TRS and the BJP finishing far ahead of Congress in both the bypolls.
Revanth was under pressure after such debilitating defeats but did not lose heart. He went ahead with his Dalit Girijana Dandoras, Yuva Sangarshana Sabhas and padayatras to infuse his fighting spirit into the party cadre. Though some seniors were against Revanth, an outsider, the party's high command gave him full support. Top leaders, including Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, did not just back Revanth from Delhi. They campaigned aggressively in the state ahead of the polls. The TPCC chief was the only state Congress leader to campaign all across Telangana. This is despite him taking on KCR from Kamareddy and also contesting from his traditional seat Kodangal.
Though Revanth (and KCR too) lost from Kamareddy to the BJP dark horse K Venkata Ramana Reddy, his decision to contest from the segment helped the Congress bag four seats from the erstwhile Nizamabad district, up from zero in 2018. The BR's bastion of North Telangana crumbled in the face of the sustained Congress campaign, helping the grand old party, which won 34 out of the 54 seats in the region, come to power in the state for the first time.
While the BJP has not yet decided its CM faces in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, Revanth’s central role in the campaign made the choice of chief minister relatively easy for the usually faction-ridden Congress. He was sworn in as Telangana CM on December 7, four days after the results.
When he was 31, Revanth spoke to a close friend about his ambition of becoming chief minister one day. For many others, that would have been just another daydream, but the hardworking Revanth has made it. Being in power for the first time, after all those years in the opposition, will be a new challenge. The beginning has been busy, with the CM listening to people’s grievances in the renamed Praja Bhavan and implementing two of the party’s six guarantees. The CM would want to keep his foot on the pedal to achieve another of his dreams — doing something beyond belief for Telangana so that people do not remember its first CM.