Revanth Reddy meets senior Congress leader Jana Reddy post his selection as TPCC chief.
Revanth Reddy meets senior Congress leader Jana Reddy post his selection as TPCC chief.

Overriding opposition, Congress picks Revanth Reddy as TPCC chief

The party has eased out Ponnam Prabhakar and Jetti Kusum Kumar, who were working presidents in the outgoing team.

HYDERABAD: Clearing the cobwebs of delays in decision-making, the Congress high command on Saturday appointed Malkajgiri MP A Revanth Reddy as president of the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC). His appointment and the balancing act that the party has done in taking senior leaders of different castes in key positions of the party indicates that it has realised the need for a team that can stand up to Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and the BJP, which is raring to come to power in the State in the next Assembly elections in 2023.

The new-look committee has, among five working presidents, one SC person (J Geetha Reddy), two BCs (Anjan Kumar Yadav, B Mahesh Kumar Goud) one Reddy (T Jagga Reddy) and one Muslim (Md Azharuddin). Among the 10 senior vicepresidents, there are two Reddys (Vem Narender Reddy and Damodar Reddy), two SCs (Sambhani Chandrasekhar and Mallu Ravi), one ST (Podem Veeraiah), three BCs (Suresh Shetkar, Ramesh Mudiraj, Gopishetty Niranjan) one Velama (T Kumar Rao) and one minority (Javed Ameer).

The party has eased out Ponnam Prabhakar and Jetti Kusum Kumar, who were working presidents in the outgoing team. Though the party considered the reconstitution of Telangana committee immediately after its drubbing in the 2018 Assembly elections at the hands of the TRS, it had kept it on the back-burner despite the fact that the delay was harming its prospects in Telangana. The party lost all elections, big and small, held subsequently and even though 12 of the 18 MLAs had defected to the TRS, the party took no decision to give its Telangana committee a new face.

Though incumbent TPCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy put in his papers quite some time ago, the party did not act on his resignation. According to sources, the only reason that the party did not appoint Revanth Reddy as president though his impending selection was an elephant in the living room, was because it was deeply worried over what would happen if all the seniors begin pulling the party in different directions. There were instances of party leaders washing dirty linen in public, denouncing the candidature of Reddy so much that the latter opened his own office in Jubilee Hills in the guise of a parliamentary constituency office and rarely went to the party headquarters in Gandhi Bhavan.

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