In another big setback to the YSR Congress Party, its MP Ryagah Krishnaiah resigned from the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
He met Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar in Delhi and submitted his resignation, which was accepted.
Krishnaiah, who hails from Telangana, said he resigned to focus on removing hurdles in strengthening the backward classes movement in Telangana.
Elected to Rajya Sabha unanimously in 2022, he still had four years of his term to run.
Krishnaiah, President of the National BC Association, was the surprise choice of the YSRCP, which had an overwhelming majority in the previous Assembly in Andhra Pradesh. His resignation came a few months after the YSRCP lost power to the Telugu Desam Party (TDP)-led alliance in Andhra Pradesh.
It was immediately unclear if Krishnaiah would return to the TDP, the party which he had joined in 2014. He was elected to the Telangana Assembly from L.B. Nagar constituency in 2014 on a TDP ticket but switched loyalties to the Congress on the eve of the 2018 elections. In the 2018 Assembly elections in Telangana, he contested unsuccessfully on a Congress ticket from the Miryalaguda constituency. In 2019, he quit the Congress and joined the YSRCP at the invitation of YSRCP President Jagan Mohan Reddy.
Krishnaiah is the third Rajya Sabha member of the YSRCP to resign in less than a month. Earlier, Mopidevi Venkataramana and Beeda Mastan Rao had resigned from the Rajya Sabha on August 29. They also quit the YSRCP and joined the TDP. With the resignation of Krishnaiah, the YSRCP’s strength in Rajya Sabha has come down to 8 from 11.
The TDP currently has no representation in the Rajya Sabha and the by-elections to be caused by three resignations will enable it to re-enter the upper House. The TDP has 135 members in the 175-member Assembly while its allies Jana Sena and BJP have 21 and 8 seats, respectively. The YSRCP has only 11 MLAs.