Union Minister and BJP State President G Kishan Reddy’s comment on poaching of MLAs in Telangana in his official X handle has evoked a verbal war between BJP and BRS. With a caption `Presenting you the MLA Poach Story of Telangana’, Kishan Reddy said that earlier the “seller” was the Congress and the “buyer” was the BRS. He added a picture of 12 Congress MLAs joining the BRS, five years ago.
This was followed with a recent picture of a news report on BRS MLAs now joining the Congress in a role reversal of sorts. It may be recalled that as many as 10 BRS MLAs joined Congress. He attempted to take a potshot on `X’ at Congress MP and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi over the defection of MLAs in the state by shooting off the BRS’s shoulder.
Kishan Reddy also addressed Rahul Gandhi in the post, saying “Mr. Rahul Gandhi, your promises can’t gloss over this blatant political opportunism! The people of Bharat are watching.” Kishan Reddy’s posting has triggered a stinging response from the BRS.
When Kishan Reddy tried to score over the Congress using the BRS, the BRS strongly hit back from its official X handle with an even more stinging post exposing how the BJP was the original `poaching master’.
Stating that “Hypocrisy ki bhi seema hoti hain!” (Hypocrisy too has limits), the BRS pointed out that for over the last decade that the BJP has ruled this country, it was always able to break Congress governments across the country.
“Your undemocratic ways have continued over the years because of the inept opposition that the Congress is,” it said in the post, which had caricatures resembling Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi and dubbing them the ‘Forever Seller’ and “Forever Buyer”.
The accompanying picture pointed out how the BJP had toppled State governments by poaching MLAs in Uttarakhand in 2016, in Manipur and Goa in 2017, in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Arunachal Pradesh in 2019, and in Puducherry in 2021. The post was titled ‘The OG Poach Story across India’.
