Hyderabad: Vijayashanthi joins Congress in presence of Kharge

She said Congress was the alternative to Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and that she joined the Congress to stop BRS supremo and Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao from capturing power in the State for the third consecutive term.

Hyderabad: Actor-politician Vijayashanthi joined the Congress in the presence of AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge at Gandhi Bhavan on Friday. She resigned from BJP on November 15.

Speaking to the media, she said Congress was the alternative to Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and that she joined the Congress to stop BRS supremo and Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao from capturing power in the State for the third consecutive term.

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It is learnt that the Congress high command has assured her Medak Lok Sabha ticket in the next year’s general elections. She has been unhappy with the functioning of the party for some time and was keeping away from party activities. She was denied a party ticket for the upcoming assembly polls and was not even included in the BJP’s star campaigners list.

The actor-turned-politician began her political career through BJP in 1998 and continued in the party for almost a decade. In 2009, she came out of BJP and founded her own party “Thalli Telangana”. However, she merged her party into BRS (then TRS) within a few months and in 2009, contested from the Medak Lok Sabha seat and won. She joined the Congress in 2014 due to differences with BRS supremo K Chandrashekar Rao. She contested from Medak in the assembly elections held in the same year and lost.

After four years in the Congress, she was appointed a star election campaigner and adviser to the election campaign committee of the TPCC by then AICC President Rahul Gandhi. Vijayashanti, who resigned from the Congress in 2020, joined the BJP in the presence of Amit Shah in December of the same year.