The 54-year-old Telangana congress president, Anumula Revanth Reddy, was sworn in as the third Chief Minister of Telangana at the LB Shastri stadium of Hyderabad on Thursday, December 7 along with his 11 member cabinet which included Congress veteran Bhatti Vikramarka Mallu who is set to take over as the Deputy Chief Minister. Gaddam Prasad Kumar, who won from Vikarabad constituency, was nominated by the party to be the speaker of the legislative assembly. The stadium was packed with a crowd of about a lakh that turned up to witness the establishment of the first Congress government in the Telugu states since the passing of YS Rajasekhara Reddy in September 2009.
Governor Tamilisai Soundarajan administered the oath to the CM, DCM as well as ten others including, Damodara Rajanarsimha from Andhole, Uttam Kumar Reddy from Huzurnagar , Komati Reddy Venkat Reddy from Nalgonda , Seethakka from Mulugu, Ponnam Prabhakar from Husnabad, Sridhar Babu from Manthani, Tummala Nageshwar Rao from Khammam, Konda Surekha from Warangal East, Jupally Krishna from Kollapur and Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy from Palair.
The significance of this victory could be gauged from the presence of the Congress top brass including national president Mallikarjun Kharge, former party presidents Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi as well as Priyanka Gandhi. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Deputy Chief Minister D. K. Shivakumar, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel, Ashok Chavan, Digvijaya Singh, Veerappa Moily, Manickam Tagore, P. Chidambaram, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Meera Kumari, KJ George, TMC leader Derek O Brien and others. Telangana is the only state where the Congress registered a victory in this round of assembly elections which were held simultaneously in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram.
Revanth Reddy, who comes from an agricultural family, was associated with the Akhila Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP) but quit Hindutva politics after his student days. He joined the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and worked under its president K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), who he managed to dethrone as the Chief Minister in the just concluded Assembly elections. After joining the TRS in 2001–2002, he left the party in 2006 and successfully contested as an independent candidate in the Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituencies (ZPTC) elections and MLC elections in 2007 from Mahabubnagar
He later joined the Telugu Desam Party, won the Kodangal constituency in 2009 on a TDP ticket and became an MLA. After Telangana was formed in 2014, he stayed with the TDP and was even made its working president by TDP supremo and ex-Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. He however quit as the TDP was subsequently weakened in the state and joined the Congress in 2017. Within a year he was made the working president in 2018, but he lost his Kodangal seat to the BRS in the previous 2018 state polls.
In 2021, fighting internal resistance, Revanth was made the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) president at a point when the party was reeling from loss-after-loss at the hands of KCR and was also in danger of being replaced by the Bharatiya Janata Party BJP). However, Revanth Reddy, who is known to be a bitter critic of KCR, has managed to turn the tables around.