TRS poised for clean sweep

Riding high on the pro-Telangana sentiment, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is poised to win 11 Assembly seats and its ally, the BJP, one seat in the by-elections which were held on July 26.

Counting of votes that began at 8 a.m. on Friday in all the 12 constituencies has been completed in seven and the results in all of them have gone in the TRS' favour, while the BJP has bagged the lone seat it contested. In the remaining five seats too, the TRS candidates are expected to win easily.

The TRS established early and unassailable leads. Its nominee from Siddipet, T. Harish Rao, who is nephew of TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao, was the first to be declare elected. He won by a record majority of 95,858 votes while his Congress and TDP challengers forfeited their security deposits.

The Congress suffered a big blow when APCC president D. Srinivas, who is the party's candidate from Nizamabad Urban, was defeated for the second consecutive time in 14 months by BJP's Y. Lakshminarayana. At one stage during the counting, Mr. Srinivas narrowed down the lead to about 5,000 votes, the nearest any candidate came anywhere near winning, but conceded defeat in the final and 19th round.

The Telugu Desam candidates put up a poor performance in the by-elections. While counting was still in progress, they were trailing in the third position in most constituencies, barring Mancherial in Adilabad district.

The by-elections were necessitated by the resignation of 10 MLAs of the TRS and one each of the TDP and BJP earlier this year. Going by the counting trends, all of them (TDP MLA joined TRS and contested on its ticket) are likely to retain their seats.

There were scenes of jubiliation in the TRS' headquarters at Jubilee Hills here. Reacting to the by-election results, Chief Minister K. Rosaiah said he respected the people's mandate.