KCR suspends daughter from BRS for accusing cousins of graft

In a rare punitive action by a leader against his own family, Bharat Rashtra Samithi chief K Chandrashekhar Rao on Tuesday suspended daughter K Kavitha from the party for working against BRS interests.

Kavitha’s suspension came a day after she publicly accused cousins T Harish Rao and J Santosh Kumar of colluding with Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy to tarnish her father.

Former MP Kavitha, currently Member, Legislative Council, alleged that her cousins had coveted gains in the Kaleshwaram project into which Telangana CM has now recommended a CBI inquiry.

“We must understand and introspect why the stain of corruption came on to KCR. Some people close to KCR have benefited in many ways by exploiting his name. KCR is getting defamed because of their misdeeds. How can the party progress like this,” Kavitha, who served as Lok Sabha MP from Nizamabad from 2014 to 2019, said in incendiary remarks against her own family.

“BRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao suspended Kavitha with immediate effect,” BRS general secretaries T Ravinder Rao and Soma Bharat Kumar said in a statement.

They said Kavitha’s conduct in recent times and her anti-party activities were hurting the BRS and the leadership has taken a serious note of it.

Kavitha’s remarks came after the Congress government in the state recommended a CBI probe into accusations of graft in the Kaleshwaram project built during the previous BRS regime.

“Did Harish Rao, who was irrigation minister for five years, not play a major role in this? This is why KCR sidelined him in his second term,” she said, naming Rao and Santosh Kumar.

Kavitha has been gradually sidelined in the BRS. Recently, she was also removed as honorary president of the Telangana Boggu Gani Karmika Sangham, the trade union of state-run coal mining firm Singareni Collieries.

This development has followed Kavitha objecting to her letters to KCR getting leaked.

“KCR is like a God surrounded by some devils,” she said at the time prompting brother and BRS working president KT Rama Rao to snub her for flagging internal matters in public.

Kavitha’s suspension, observers say, is part of the family’s legacy war for former CM Rao’s political inheritance.