The Mancherial constituency witnessed a dramatic ending as Kokkirala Premsagar Rao, the Indian National Congress (INC) candidate, won by garnering 1,05,945 votes. The second position was held by the Bharatiya Janata Party”s (BJP) Raghunath Verabelli. Raghunath Verabelli lost the position at a margin of 66,116 votes. At the same time the current MLA and Bharatiya Rashtra Samiti (BRS) candidate Diwakar Rao Nadipelli was pushed back to third position, and received only 37,989 votes.
Mancherial constituency is one of the 3 constituencies in the Mancherial district of the Telangana Legislative Assembly. It comes under the Peddapalli Lok Sabha constituency along with other 6 assembly constituencies. The constituency has witnessed the supremacy of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) from 2009 to the 2018 assembly elections. The TRS party have consecutively won the elections in the constituency with Gaddam Aravinda Reddy from 2009 to 2014 and with current MLA and candidate Diwakar Rao Nadipelli from 2014 to till now as it’s forerunners.
However, later in the 2014 election, Gaddam Reddy joined the Indian National Congress (INC) and participated under their banner, which witnessed a major turnover in the constituency and boost of Divakar Rao who was the then TRS candidate. Likely in 2009, while Gaddam was the representative of TRS the major opponent INC was represented by the current MLA and TRS candidate Diwakar. In short, the constituency was a major witness to the paradigm shift of political leaders and change of alliances in the Indian context.
In the previous assembly election of 2018 with an electoral pool of 2,27,232, Diwakar Rao was able to secure 75,360 votes, just 4,848 votes more than the runner up candidate. The runner up candidate, Kokkirala Premsagar Rao, representative of INC, secured 70,512 votes. The third position was secured by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Ragunath Verabelli with just 5,018 votes.
While in the assembly election of 2014 the same Diwakar Rao was able to secure 95,171 votes under the same TRS. It was during this election Gaddam joined INC and competed against the TRS and Diwakar. However, he was pushed back to the second position receiving just 35,921 votes. At the same time the BJP candidate Mulkala Mallareddy was only able to gather 11,584 votes from the 2,38,486 total electors in the constituency.
According to the latest reports, out of the total 119 seats, INC won 42 seats and was leading in 22 seats. While BRS is placed in the second position winning 18 seats and leading in 21 seats. BJP is currently at the third position in the total seat share. Along with Telangana, the Assembly elections were held in four other states including Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. The results of these states except Mizoram was also announced on Sunday with BJP leading in all of the other three states.
(This story is part of a Timeline. internship project “Whom They Voted For: Celebrating The National Festival”. This internship project is being organised aimed at helping young minds understand the electoral process of the country.)
