 "Telangana Chief Minister Anumula Revanth Reddy (second from left) flanked by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge (left), and party leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during his oath taking ceremony in Hyderabad on Thursda")
On Thursday, a decade after its inception, Telangana got its second chief minister (CM), Anumala Revanth Reddy, and its first Dalit deputy CM in Mallu Bhatti Vikaramarka.
In his first decision after taking the oath, the 54-year-old CM began the process of implementing the Congress’ six poll guarantees, and his second plan is to provide jobs to disabled women.
In the afternoon, Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan administered Reddy the oath of office in Hyderabad’s Lal Bahadur Shastri Stadium in a well-attended ceremony.
Vikaramarka, Congress legislative party leader in the 2018-23 Assembly, took the oath. So did 10 others as minister.
Vikarabad legislator Gaddam Prasad Kumar will be speaker of the new Assembly, the party said.
Senior Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Vadra, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh CMs Siddaramaiah and Sukhvinder Singh, and Karnataka Deputy CM D K Shivkumar were present at the ceremony, as were representatives of INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc partners. The stadium was packed with party workers from across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
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Congress leaders Ashok Gehlot and Bhupesh Baghel also attended.
Vikaramarka, Uttam Kumar Reddy, Venkat Reddy, and other senior party leaders such as Ponnam Prabhakar, D Sridhar Babu and Damodar Raja Narasimha -- senior leaders who were sulking -- find a place in the Cabinet, as do two women, Konda Surekha and Dansari Anasuya.
The Telangana Council of Ministers has three Reddys other than the CM. Ponnam Prabhakar and Konda Surekha are the Other Backward Classes (OBC) faces. Dansari Anasuya belongs to the Scheduled Tribes, and Damodar Raja Narasimha is from the Scheduled Castes. Sridhar Babu is Brahmin, Nageshwara Rao is the lone Kamma face, and Krishna Rao is from the Velama community. The newly sworn-in ministerial council does not have any Muslim representation because none of the Muslims the Congress fielded won.
Muslims comprise 12 per cent of Telangana’s population.
As a symbol of fulfilling the promises in the Congress manifesto to make the government and the CM more accessible to the people, which, it had said, outgoing CM K Chandrasekhar Rao wasn’t, workers dismantled the iron barricades that guard the CM’s residence-cum-office.
Addressing the gathering at his swearing-in ceremony, Revanth Reddy said the barricades and the iron fence around Pragati Bhavan were being dismantled and renamed “Jyotirao Phule Praja Bhavan”. The CM said a “Praja Darbar” would be held at 10 am on December 8.
In Telangana, the Congress’ six guarantees include financial assistance of Rs 2,500 for women heads of households, an LPG cylinder at Rs 500, 200 units of free electricity for all households, Rs 15,000 per acre annually for farmers, Rs 12,000 per year to agricultural labourers, a bonus of Rs 500 per year for paddy crops, and Rs 4,000 monthly pension for senior citizens.
Telangana’s own tax revenues have been healthy in the last seven years, accounting for over 60 per cent of its revenue receipts, including projections for 2022–23 and 2023–24. The state projected a revenue surplus for 2022-23 and 2023-24. It achieved a revenue surplus of 0.5 per cent of gross state domestic product during 2022-23 against the revised estimates of 0.2 per cent.
Revanth Reddy was associated with the Akhila Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP) in his student days, later joining the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in 2001-02. In 2006, he successfully contested as an independent in the Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituencies and Legislative Council elections in 2007 from Mahabubnagar. In 2009, he won the Assembly polls from the Kodangal constituency on the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) ticket.
After Telangana was carved out, TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu appointed Revanth Reddy the party’s working president. He joined the Congress in 2017 because he found the TDP weakening in the state. The Congress made him working president of the party a year later, but he lost his Kodangal seat to the Bharat Rashtra Samithi in the 2018 Assembly polls.
The Congress appointed him state unit chief in 2021 despite resistance.
