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The polling for the much-awaited Huzurabad (Telangana) Assembly by-election will be held on October 30. The notification for the bypoll, along with 29 other Assembly Constituencies and three Lok Sabha Constituencies in the country, will be issued on October 1.
The last date for filing nominations is October 8 and the election process will be completed on November 5, according to the schedule released by the Election Commission of India.
Why bypoll
The bypoll was necessitated after the former senior leader of the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) Eatala Rajender quit the party in June 2021 over the alleged harassment by his former mentor and Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.
He was ousted from the Cabinet after the State Government ordered a probe into the land grab allegations against Rajender.
Rajender, however, alleged that there was no internal democracy in the party and even the top leaders in the party and Opposition MLAs were not given appointment to meet the Chief Minister.
Rajender later joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and set off for a padayatra in the Constituency, appealing the voters to re-elect him to the Assembly and teach ‘despotic KCR’ a lesson.
The ruling party has taken the imminent bypoll seriously and deployed a few Ministers, including Finance Minister and Chief Minister’s nephew T Harish Rao, who launched an election campaign over two months ago.
Financial aid to Dalits
Leaving no stone unturned to defeat his former Cabinet colleague, the Chief Minister had announced an ambitious scheme ‘Dalit Bandhu’, which seeks to provide a financial assistance of ₹10 lakh each to Dalit families to start their entrepreneurial ventures.
The pilot is being rolled out in the Constituency, along with three other Constituencies in the State.
The Opposition alleged that the scheme is targetted at a huge Dalit vote bank in the Constituency.
A victory in the poll is very important for the TRS President as Rajender’s re-election would strengthen the arms of the BJP, which is aspiring to clinch the 2023 elections to the Assembly.
Besides the Congress party, which is in the process of regaining its lost glory in the State, KCR also finds a new challenge in the form of late Congress leader Y S Rajasehkara Reddy’s daughter Sharmila, who floated a new party – YSR Telangana Party eyeing the Dalit and Christian votes in the State.
The Congress too is back in the race after the newly-appointed Pradesh Congress Committee President A Revanth Reddy trying to regroup the party cadre, whose morale was down after a series of electoral defeats.
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