Telangana Chief Minister and Telangana Rashtra Samithi president K. Chandrasekhar Rao is likely to promote his son, also the IT and Municipal Administration Minister, K.T. Rama Rao as the party’s working president soon. An announcement to this effect is expected during the party’s 16th plenary in Hyderabad on 21 April.
The plenary will also see the unopposed re-election of KCR as the party president for another term of two years. Though KTR has said he is unaware of any such proposal, his father is under pressure from a section of the TRS cadre, especially young legislators and district level leaders, to give a bigger role to KTR. According to sources close to KCR, the CM wants his son to be groomed to lead the party in the 2019 polls. KCR had received proposals from TRS seniors in the last plenary in 2016 to make KTR the party’s vice-president, but somehow that didn’t happen.
“It is a fact that our leader (KCR) has been receiving requests from several quarters especially, the young MLAs and MPs, to make KTR the working president, TRS MLA from Armoor, Asannagari Jeevan Reddy told The Sunday Guardian.
Agriculture Minister Pocharam Srinivas Reddy lauded the 40-year-old KTR. “We are lucky to have him (KTR) here today and I am sure Nizamabad would be benefited from his arrival today,” said Srinivas Reddy, whose political career spanned over close to four decades. Another senior leader, Rajya Sabha member D. Srinivas, 68, praised KTR as the future leader of the party and “the son who matched his father”.
KTR has, so far, addressed three big rallies across Telangana, including one at Vikarabad and Wanaparty in south Telangana in the last one week, signalling an impending generational shift in the party.
In TRS, no other minister except the CM had so far addressed public meetings outside their own Assembly constituencies.