Hyderabad, March 9 Actor-politician Vijayashanthi and Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) general secretary Addanki Dayakar are among three candidates announced by the Congress party on Sunday for biennial elections to the Legislative Council from MLAs’ quota.
Kethavath Shankar Naik, District Congress Committee president from Nalgonda, is the third candidate.
AICC President Mallikarjun Kharge approved the candidatures of the three leaders. The party has also decided to leave one seat to its ally the Communist Party of India (CPI).
Members of the State Legislative Assembly will elect five members to the Legislative Council on March 20.
The vacancies are arising due to the retirement of four MLCs of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) including Mallesham Yegge, who defected to Congress from BRS last year and Mirza Riyazul Hassan Effendi of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM).
Congress has 65 members in the 119-member Assembly and also enjoys the support of 10 BRS MLAs who defected last year. Its ally CPI has one MLA while friendly party AIMIM has seven members.
The BRS, which has 28 members, is likely to field one candidate.
The Congress party has rewarded Vijayashanthi, who quit as BJP national executive member, to join Congress just before the 2023 Assembly elections.
Popular as ‘Lady Amitabh’ for her action roles in Telugu films, Vijayashanthi joined the BJP in 1997 and served as general secretary of the party’s women’s wing.
She quit the BJP in 2005 to float a separate outfit, Talli Telangana, to fight for separate statehood for Telangana.
She later merged Talli Telangana with TRS (now BRS) and was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Medak constituency in 2009.
In August 2013, a few months before the formation of Telangana state, TRS suspended Vijayashanthi for anti-party activities.
She later joined the Congress party and unsuccessfully contested from the Medak Assembly constituency in the 2014 polls.
After lying low for four years, Vijayashanthi again became active in Congress in 2017 and was named its star campaigner for the party in the 2018 Assembly polls. After the party’s debacle, she was not active in the party and returned to BJP in 2020.
Vijayashanthi, whose film career spans nearly four decades, has acted in over 180 films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi.
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