Former Telangana Member of Parliament and popular Telugu actress M Vijayashanti returned to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday after a formal induction ceremony in Delhi, ANI news agency reported. This comes a day after he met the Union Interior Minister Amit Shah. Vijayashanti had recently left the Congress party that he had joined in 2014.
After his meeting with Shah, Telangana BJP leader G Vivek Venkatswamy said: “The BJP will definitely win at the Telangana Assembly next time. Vijayashanti ji will be at the forefront for the development of the party in the state.
Vijayashanti began her political career in the BJP in 1998 and was appointed secretary of the party’s Mahila Morcha. When the Telangana movement reached its peak, she resigned from the BJP and launched her own regional Talli Telangana party, but was unable to sustain it for long.
She merged her party with Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) in 2009 and was elected to Lok Sabha from the Medak parliamentary constituency. However, when she was sidelined in TRS during the formation of Telangana in 2014, Vijayashanti resigned from TRS and joined Congress.
She was the congressional star activist in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and later served as an advisor to the election campaign committee of the Telangana Pradesh Congressional Committee (PCC).
However, she had stayed away from congressional meetings and other activities for quite some time and on many occasions expressed her dissatisfaction that the PCC did not invite her to party meetings.
The BJP had made significant strides in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls, winning 48 seats, seven fewer than the ruling TRS, which emerged as the largest party with 55 seats.
BJP’s strong performance came on the heels of its victory last month in the Dubbaka assembly seat. The party had taken the seat from the ruler TRS.
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