For someone hailing from a political family who took to part-time politics initially life has come full circle for Kalvakuntla Kavitha within a span of just 10 years. From getting elected to Parliament with a handsome majority on her debut attempt to losing the next election and then getting elected as an MLC and ending up in Tihar jail on the charges of an economic offence, she has seen it all.
Central government agencies that investigate the controversial Delhi liquor policy case accuse her of having links to a ‘south lobby’ that made unlawful gains from the Delhi government’s liquor policy. Ms. Kavitha, the daughter of former Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), however, remains unperturbed.
A software engineer by profession, Ms. Kavitha worked for a few years in the U.S. before returning to the country in 2006 with plans to enter politics. She joined the movement of statehood for Telangana, spearheaded by KCR, the founder of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS, now known as Bharat Rashtra Samithi, or BRS).
She founded the Telangana Jagruthi, a cultural organisation affiliated to the TRS, to work for the ‘cultural awakening’ of the region in the same year. The organisation struck a cultural chord with the people of Telangana by organising mass celebrations of ‘Bathukamma’, a festival of flowers, being celebrated in the region.
After Telangana got statehood in February 2014, Ms. Kavitha took a plunge into electoral politics. She contested to the Lok Sabha from Nizamabad and won. She later became the honorary president of the Telangana Boggu Gani Karmika Sangham, a trade union in Singareni Collieries Company.
She tasted defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, but within a year, she entered the legislative council from the Nizamabad local authorities’ constituency. While being a member of State Legislature, she continued to maintain her links in Delhi, established during her MP tenure from 2014 to 2019, which apparently helped her play a role in ‘helping the south-lobby”, as alleged by the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI.
Political vendetta
Both Ms. Kavitha and her party have denied the charges and termed her arrest in the liquor policy case part of the BJP’s vendetta politics against the parties which refuse to toe its line. The defeat of the BRS in the 2023 Assembly elections has precipitated the matter in the liquor policy case. She was implicated by some other accused who were arrested.
The ED arrested her on March 15, after including her in the case as a witness. She was arrested by the CBI in the same case on April 11.
The BRS slammed the BJP government for the arrest and the Congress for its ‘double standard’. The Congress had slammed the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in the case and termed it political a witch-hunt, while Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy and other Congress leaders from the State supported the arrest of Ms. Kavitha in the same case, the BRS said. “How can a national party have two stands — one at national level and the other at local level — on the same issue?” BRS senior leader and former Minister T. Harish Rao said.
Interestingly, BRS MLA Kadiyam Srihari, who is now with the Congress, had led a protest on March 16 against Ms. Kavitha’s arrest, terming it undemocratic and a conspiracy hatched by the BJP to hit the morale of the BRS and target KCR politically ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. After joining the Congress, Mr. Srihari changed his opinion. He now says the BRS’s graph is coming down because of corruption allegations against its leaders, and that he had no other way left but to join the Congress “for the development of my constituency”.
Irrespective of what’s in store for her in courts in the coming months, it’s a testing time for Ms. Kavitha as well as the first family of the BRS. She says she would come clean as a pearl as she has done nothing wrong. It’s time for her to prove her critics wrong, as the BRS is still struggling to recover from the Assembly election defeat.
