Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s Vijayalakshmi R. Gadwal was elected as the new Mayor of Greater Hyderabad on Thursday.
Mothe Srilatha, also of TRS, was elected Deputy Mayor in the election by show of hands at the first meeting of newly elected council of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC).
For the first time in the municipal body’s history, women have been elected to the posts of both Mayor and Deputy Mayor.
Vijayalakshmi is daughter of TRS general secretary and Rajya Sabha member K. Keshav Rao. She was elected from Banjara Hills division in the GHMC polls held in December. Srilatha was elected corporator from Tarnaka.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) contested for both the posts, fielding Radha Reddy and Shankar Yadav for Mayor and Deputy Mayor respectively. As TRS had comfortable majority in the council and MIM too backed it, both its candidates were declared elected.
Election Officer Sweta Mohanty announced the election of Mayor and Deputy Mayor.
Earlier, 149 newly-elected corporators belonging to four parties took oath. They were allowed to take oath in language of their choice among English, Telugu, Urdu and Hindi.
Sweta Mohanty administered oath to the corporators.
In 150-member GHMC, TRS had bagged 56 seats while BJP won 48 seats. One of the BJP corporators died of Covid after the election. MIM won 44 seats and Congress two.
A total 44 ex-officio members (MPs, MLAs and MLCs) were also eligible to vote to elect Mayor and Deputy Mayor. TRS had the highest number of ex-officio members at 32, followed by MIM at 10 and BJP at two.
The elections to GHMC were held on December 1 while the results were declared on December 4. The bitterly contested election saw TRS’ tally coming down to 56 from 99 it had won in 2016.
The saffron party, which had just four seats in the previous body, bagged second highest number of seats due to high-pitch campaign involving party’s national president J.P. Nadda, union home minister Amit Shah and other central leaders.
Though MIM retained 44 seats it had won in 2016, the party was once again deprived of the role of kingmaker in the municipal body. The party had traditionally enjoyed the role of kingmaker and had its corporators as Mayor or Deputy Mayor.
Though MIM is a friendly party of TRS, the latter decided to keep the posts of both Mayor and Deputy Mayor with itself.
During the poll campaign, BJP leaders had slammed Chandrasekhar Rao for his ‘secret understanding’ with MIM.
Though there were speculations that MIM may field candidates for posts of Mayor and Deputy Mayor, in a last-minute decision it decided to back TRS candidates.
