The cup of woes of YSR Congress party will be full when the lone MP and MLA left with it joins the ruling TRS in the presence of its president and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Wednesday.
The YSR Congress now stands on the same pedestal as Bahujan Samaj Party which had two members in the Assembly and, by virtue of both of them joining the TRS, was eventually merged with the ruling party.
The joining of the Khammam MP Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy and Pinapaka MLA Payam Venkateswarlu in TRS had been speculated for quite sometime but it was deferred till the by-election to the Palair Assembly election for political gains. The TRS leadership deliberately timed the admission into party of Congress MLA of Khammam Puvvada Ajay Kumar and the YSR Congress leaders to hit the Opposition hard ahead of elections, sources said.
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Incidentally, Mr. Ajay Kumar, who joined the TRS a few days ago, was praised by Irrigation Minister T. Harish Rao as a good entrepreneur in the budget session of the Assembly.
Mr. Venkateswarlu was the last of the three YSR Congress MLAs left in Khammam where the party produced an impressive performance in 2014 general elections.
The TRS had been never considered a force to reckon with in Khammam but it opened its account winning one Assembly constituency in 2014.
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Barring a few meetings to highlight the displacement of tribals due to the construction of Polavaram project when the TRS was in agitation mode for statehood, the party was not seriously focused on the district as a result of which it could not build up its organisational network there.
Post-election, the TRS gave importance to Khammam politically by straightaway inducting into Cabinet Tummala Nageswara Rao who defected from the TDP. Mr. Rao and another leader from the district Balasani Laxminarayana were later made MLCs.