Telangana Chief Minister K Chandra Shekhar Rao greets party candidate Kotha Prabhakar Reddy (PTI)
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi reclaimed the Medak parliamentary seat today with an emphatic win. Even though the victory margin was 3,61,277 votes, party leader and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao does not believe that the huge win is a referendum on his government.
"We have been in government for 100 days and if I may be honest, we have done nothing so far. We have to do so much more. So this is certainly not a referendum on our performance," said KCR, as he is popularly known.
The new TRS lawmaker from Medak, Kotha Prabhakar Reddy, refuses to acknowledge that it is the honeymoon period that has helped him win with such an impressive margin, just about 30,000 short of KCR's own win four months ago.
"It is not honeymoon period. It is development period. People are hopeful that the policies we have put in place will lead to development," Mr Reddy told NDTV.
The Congress candidate, former Minister V Sunitha Laxma Reddy, garnered 2,10,523 votes against Prabhakar Reddy's 5,71,800. The Bharatiya Janata Party-Telugu Desam Party combine candidate Toorpu Jayaprakash Reddy or Jagga Reddy, as he is known, got 1,86,334 votes.
The TRS had fought this as a prestige battle, claiming that the victory margin of the transport company owner, who the TRS put up, would better KCR's win margin of 3.97 lakh. With the voter turnout falling to 68 per cent from the 78 per cent in the general elections, that was not likely.