Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) president K Chandrasekhar Rao announced on Friday, March 22, that former IPS officer RS Praveen Kumar will contest from Nagarkurnool Parliamentary seat. He named another former bureaucrat, P Venkatram Reddy, to contest from the Medak Parliamentary seat. So far, BRS has announced six candidates for the total 17 Lok Sabha seats in Telangana.
Praveen Kumar, who is the former Telangana chief of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), joined the BRS on March 18 after initially announcing an alliance with the party. Praveen Kumar is a former IPS officer who served as the Secretary of the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society for nearly a decade, before opting for voluntary retirement and entering politics.
Venkatram Reddy, a former District Collector of Siddipet, had taken voluntary retirement a day before being nominated as a Member of the Legislative Council (MLC) by BRS in 2021. Venkatram Reddy had been embroiled in a controversy in the past for touching the feet of then Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao during the inauguration of the new Collectorate building at the Siddipet district headquarters.
Earlier on March 4, BRS announced its first list of candidates, which included Nama Nageswara Rao for Khammam, B Vinod Kumar for Karimnagar, Maloth Kavitha for Mahabubabad, and Koppula Eshwar for Peddapalli.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) announced that polling for the 2024 general elections to the Lok Sabha in Telangana will take place on May 13. In the previous 2019 general elections, BRS had secured nine seats, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won four and the Indian National Congress got three seats. All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi retained his party’s sole seat from the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency.