WARANAGAL: As the Lok Sabha elections draw close, Congress nominee for Warangal (SC) seat Kadiyam Kavya is facing political headwinds.
Kavya joined the Congress at the eleventh hour, after spurning the ticket allotted to her by BRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao. Her father and Station Ghanpur BRS MLA Kadiyam Srihari also crossed the Rubicon and joined the grand old party.
The main problem that Kavya would face is lack of cooperation from the Madiga sub-caste of SCs as she belongs to another sub-caste — Byndla.
In Station Ghanpur and Wardhannapet, the Madigas are against her candidature. They expected the party to nominate a Madiga leader but instead it brought in the BRS candidate who does not belong to their caste.
Madiga Reservation Porata Samiti (MRPS) founder-president Manda Krishna Madiga also called upon the Madigas not to vote for Kavya, claiming that Srihari had suppressed the growth of Madigas in Telangana.
He appealed to the Madiga voters to exercise their franchise in favour of BJP as it, according to him, is the only party that was committed to sub-categorisation of the SCs for the purpose of reservations in education and employment.
‘Defeat imminent’
Meanwhile, BJP candidate and former BRS MLA from Wardhannapet Aroori Ramesh said that Kavya’s defeat is imminent.
He said that the Congress cadre who belong to Madiga sub-caste support him and said they would never vote for Kavya. Ramesh said that the Madigas were repenting for defeating him in the Assembly elections when he contested on a BRS ticket from Wardhannapet and now they would not commit the same mistake by defeating him again.
He alleged Kavya will face trouble in all seven Assembly segments of the Lok Sabha constituency.
Opinion is divided if the voters in the remaining five Assembly segments in the Lok Sabha constituency — Palakurthy, Warangal East, Warangal West, Bhupalpally, and Parkal — are not willing to support Srihari and his daughter.
Old vs new
Those who are against Srihari say that he is new to the Congress. He was in the TDP in the undivided Andhra Pradesh and then joined the BRS after the formation of Telangana state.
But Srihari believes that his BRS contacts, particularly those who benefited from him, would support his daughter at the hustings.
But it is difficult to say if the BRS cadre would support Srihari particularly in the wake of the call given by the party leadership to defeat Kavya decisively in the election.
Srihari is expecting that people in all the seven Assembly segments would support his daughter.