Shock for TRS as BJP wrests Dubbak in Telangana

Hyderabad, Nov 10 : In a major setback to Telangana’s ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wrested the Dubbak Assembly seat by a margin of over 1,000 votes.
In a nail-biting finish, BJP’s M. Raghunandan Rao beat his nearest rival S. Sujatha of TRS by 1,079 votes in the stronghold of the ruling party and the home district of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
Though the celebrations in the BJP camp began soon after the completion of the 23rd and last round of counting, the election authorities delayed the result as votes in four electronic voting machines (EVMs) could not be counted due to technical glitch.
The authorities counted VVPATs of these EVMs in the 24th round. However, the counting in this round did not have any impact on the outcome.
BJP polled 63,352 votes while the TRS secured 62,273 votes. The Congress’ Cheruku Srinivas Reddy finished third with 22,196 votes.
TRS had won the seat in the 2018 elections. The by-election was caused by the death of sitting legislator S. Ramalinga Reddy. The ruling party had fielded his widow S. Sujatha.