HYDERABAD, JUNE 24 :  Congress senior leader and advisor to the Telangana Government (SC, ST, BC & Minorities), Mohammed Ali Shabbir on Monday said that the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) party has no moral right to speak about defection as its party’s chief K Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR) has started the culture of defections in 2014.

Addressing the media persons at Gandhi Bhavan here, Shabbir Ali said that KCR engineered the defection of 61 elected representatives in his two terms initiating the culture of defections in the newly formed Telangana.

He said that KCR started the culture of defection from the day he came to power in 2014 and continued it till he lost the 2023 Assembly elections.

On June 2, 2014, on the day Telangana was officially formed, two BSP MLAs, Indrakaran Reddy and Koneru Konappa, defected to the BRS while on December 16, 2014, Talasani Srinivas Yadav, a Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MLA, was appointed as a Minister, he said.

As per the rules, Yadav should have resigned within six months and faced bye-elections, but he continued in his position without doing so, the senior Congress leader pointed out.

KCR subsequently facilitated the defection of 11 TDP MLAs one after another, culminating in the official merger of TDP with BRS on March 11, 2016.

“Srinivas Yadav remained a TDP MLA and a TRS Minister for 14 months and 24 days,” Mr. Shabbir Ali highlighted how the BRS breached democratic principles.

He said that during KCR’s first term (2014-2018), four MPs, 25 MLAs, and 18 MLCs from other parties defected to BRS, totaling 47 defections while in the second term (2018-2023), another 14 MLAs, including 12 from Congress and two from TDP, defected to BRS.

Overall, KCR made 59 elected representative defects to their parties in 10 years, said Shabbir Ali.
The BRS also made thousands of Sarpanches, ZPTC, MPTC, Councillors, Corporators, and other leaders defect to BRS from the then opposition parties.

BRS (earlier known as TRS) survived and thrived solely based on defections, he said that KCR decimated the entire opposition. He could not tolerate any opposition presence in the State.

He said KCR took away Dalit leader Bhatti Vikramarka of the Leader of Opposition status by engineering the defection of 12 Congress MLAs.

Similarly, Shabbir Ali accused KCR of inducing Congress MLCs to defect to BRS to prevent him, a Muslim leader, from assuming the position of Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Council.

Today, the same BRS leaders are shamelessly talking about the anti-defection law and morals, he pointed out.

When the Congress and TDP MLAs joined TRS, KCR claimed they were joining the ruling party for the development of their constituencies and Telangana, he said and questioned “Why the same logic is not being applied, when they are joining Congress from the BRS party”.

Out of 39, more than 30 BRS MLAs are ready to join the Congress and the BRS party will lose its status of main opposition in the next few days, he claimed.

Except for KCR family members, there will be no one in the BRS, he added(UNI)