People Voted in favour of Separate Telangana: Elected all TRS Candidates as MLA's

The people who strongly supported to bifurcate the Andhrapradesh state into two has elected all the candidates belonging to Telangana Rashtira Samithi (TRS) party in the by-election. Even the ruling Congress lost in the elections held for 12 constituency the another major political party Telugu Desam Party (TDP)lead by former Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu lost its deposits. The Praja Rajyam Party(PRP) of Telugu Super Star Siranjeeva was thrown in to mud by Telangana people.

Riding high on a strong regional sentiment, the TRS, and its lone electoral ally, the Bharathiya Janatha Party(BJP, headed for a clean sweep of all the 12 seats in the Assembly by-elections on Friday and inflicted crushing defeats on the Congress, TDP and the PRP.

Results were officially declared in the early morning of Saturday all the constituencies TRS candidates and a lone BJP candidate are declared elected with huge margin of Votes. The state Congress President Srinivas defeated by huge margin of votes.

The BJP won the only seat it contested when Y. Lakshminarayana, justified his ‘giant-killer' sobriquet by defeating for the second consecutive time State Congress President D. Srinivas from Nizamabad Urban by a comfortable margin of 11,983 votes. TDP candidate A. Narsa Reddy was routed polling just 1,793 votes.
Till late in the night, the election authorities could declare the results of only those seats where electronic voting machines (EVMs) were used. Counting in the rest was a painstaking process as the Election Commission was forced to use newspaper-sized ballot papers after the TRS fielded dozens of candidates as independents to express its opposition to EVMs.

Voters comprehensively rejected the TDP which failed to poll even one-sixth of the valid votes needed to retain the security deposit in at least seven constituencies whereas the Congress candidates lost their deposits in two places. Both parties tried to draw solace by saying that TRS candidates had merely retained the Assembly seats they won in May 2009.

These MLAs had resigned in February this year to protest against the terms of reference of the Justice Srikrishna Committee constituted to hold consultations on the situation in Andhra Pradesh.

- Asian Tribune -