As power equations see changes, the daughters of top political families in the Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are struggling to make their presence felt.
Common factor between them: the “suffocation” within their parties as well as the state’s politics.
In Telangana, Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) MLC K Kavitha quit the party on Wednesday, a day after she was suspended for “anti-party activities” following her outburst against her cousins – former minister T Harish Rao and ex-Rajya Sabha MP J Santosh Kumar.
In neighbouring Andhra, YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) chief Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy and his sister, who is also the Andhra Congress president, on Tuesday were seen competing with each other in paying tributes to their father, former Andhra CM Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, on his 16th death anniversary.
While Kavitha is yet to spell out her future course of action, Sharmila has been left with almost no political space as Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party (JSP), which is in government in Andhra along with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and BJP, is seen to be eating into the Congress support base. Meanwhile, Jagan is seen as the uncontested heir to his father’s illustrious legacy.
Despite being a vital cog in the YSRCP’s scheme of things since its inception in 2011, Sharmila started feeling sidelined after she was not given an important role in the government following Jagan’s landslide victory in the 2019 Assembly polls.
The wedge between the siblings deepened in 2021 after Sharmila surfaced in Hyderabad and launched the YSR Telangana Party (YSRTP) with her mother Y S Vijaya Lakshmi by her side. As her party failed to gain momentum, Sharmila announced that she would not field candidates against the Congress in the 2023 Telangana Assembly polls and eventually merged her party with the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha elections last year.
Since her return to Andhra as the state Congress chief, she has been consistently attacking Jagan over a host of issues. Last year, she unsuccessfully contested the Kadapa Lok Sabha election against cousin and YSRCP candidate Y S Avinash Reddy, whom she has blamed for the death of her uncle and former Kadapa MP Y S Vivekananda Reddy, while accusing Jagan of shielding Avinash.
Since Jagan’s defeat in last year’s Assembly polls, tensions within the YSR family have heightened with Sharmila accusing her brother of trying to usurp her rightful share of family wealth.
A similar sibling rivalry has panned out within the Kalvakuntla family in Telangana, where Kavitha, the daughter of former CM and party supreme K Chandrashekar Rao, felt stifled within the party after her name propped up in the alleged Delhi excise scam.
A former MLC and MP, Kavitha was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in March last year in connection with the case and secured bail only five months later. Since then, she has been touring Telangana and holding meetings under the banner of Telangana Jagruthi, a non-profit organisation she founded in 2006.
“In recent months, her relevance within the party reduced while that of Harish Rao and Kumar rose,” as per a source.
The unease among members of the BRS’s “first family” came to the fore in May this year , a month after KCR’s last public appearance at the party plenary in Elkathurthy, after a letter written by Kavitha to her father where she raised a number of issues, was “leaked”. Things worsened days later after she claimed that the BRS and BJP engaged in merger talks behind her back while she was in jail.
Things spiralled out of control on Monday, a day after the Revanth Reddy-led Telangana government handed over the Kaleshwaram probe to the CBI, after she accused Harish Rao and Kumar of “being responsible for the probe on my father”.