Defectors wait; records don’t
BRS wants Congress turncoats disqualified. The BJP wanted one too. The court is still waiting on the Speaker’s Tribunal to hand over its own paperwork.
The High Court is awaiting the Tribunal’s records in the defection petitions.
The Telangana High Court is hearing petitions to disqualify MLAs elected on BRS tickets who later joined the Congress — and it is still waiting on the Speaker’s Tribunal to file the records of its own decisions, according to a report of the July 22 hearing that posted the matter to August 12.
What is uncontested is the core dispute. A Supreme Court judgment from July 31, 2025 records that BRS MLAs Danam Nagender, Kadiyam Srihari and Tellam Venkata Rao were alleged to have joined the Congress in March–April 2024, that BRS legislators filed disqualification petitions with the Speaker, and that BJP MLA Alleti Maheshwar Reddy separately sought Nagender’s disqualification. It also lists the 2024 High Court writs that pressed the Speaker to act.
By March 25, 2026, the High Court had issued notices in a later batch challenging the Speaker’s dismissal of petitions, including to seven MLAs named in that report and to Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar. The fight is therefore squarely about Congress-benefiting defections and what the Speaker did with them — or didn’t.
What we cannot yet verify is what exactly happened on August 12. No publicly accessible High Court order confirms whether the Tribunal finally filed the papers, whether the bench passed directions, or whether the matter was pushed yet again. The Congress’s beneficiaries in this are obvious; the documentation, not so much.