It’s BRS show in CESS polls

Party-backed candidates win all 15 director posts, humiliating loss for BJP

Hyderabad: The message is loud and clear. People have sent out a clear signal that they continue to repose their confidence in the leadership of Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, when they accorded a resounding victory to all the 15 candidates supported by the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in the elections held to the Cooperative Electric Supply Society (CESS) here on Monday.

The candidates supported by the BRS swept the polls when they won all 15 director posts in one of the oldest cooperative societies in the country and the candidates backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received a humiliating defeat.

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The electoral outcome assumes extreme significance on several counts. This is the first election after the BRS came into existence, which the BJP made a no-holds-barred fight to show that the BRS had lost steam. Incidentally, all the 13 mandals which went to polls fall in the Karimnagar parliamentary constituency represented by the BJP State president Bandi Sanjay.

The fight at the hustings was so severe that the BJP State president Bandi Sanjay conducted several meetings, where he launched diatribes against the BRS with his unbridled criticism, but the people have shown that they would not fall for the incendiary speeches, which often bordered on abusive and offensive language.

Of the 87,130 voters, 84 per cent exercised their franchise and as many as 75 candidates were in the fray and BJP supported candidates in all the seats. The results of the fierce electoral battle, where the BJP spent a humongous amount of money, left the saffron party licking its wounds.

While results of 14 seats, the BRS established its supremacy, the last seat, that of Vemulawada rural, was bagged by the BRS in a nail-biting finish. The ruling party-backed candidate Akula Deveraju won the election by three votes.

Adopting its formulae of influencing the voters with money and other appeasements backed by an intense social media offensive, the BJP had set its eyes on these elections to score a point after suffering defeat in the Munugode by-poll. But the BJP’s unrelenting efforts to break the BRS fortress in the rural areas went futile.

With the CESS elections being the first polls for BRS, party working president KT Rama Rao left nothing to chance. He personally monitored all aspects and even introduced all the candidates to the people through a press conference.