Nallagonda killa meeda gulabi jenda, the TRS (now BRS) election campaign song in 2018 was prophetic. It won the 11 Assembly segments in the composite district, including two bypolls in Nagarjunasagar and Huzurnagar, and Nakrekal (SC), whose Congress legislator decided to wear the pink kanduva just three months after the December election. However, this ‘fortress’ has been stormed now (see table).
“I wanted to contest from Nalgonda, but people from my Gajwel constituency did not want me to leave. But, if the TRS candidate is elected from here, I will adopt Nalgonda,” party supremo and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had said in 2018. “Building infrastructure, mutual single permit directions for cement industries and rice mills in Miryalaguda and Huzurnagar (with Andhra Pradesh), and up to ₹10 lakh in farmers’ accounts through Bangaru Telangana,” he promised.
It was in 2009 that TRS entered Nalgonda through Alair segment, and painted it pink in less than a decade. In 2020, the government said that it had ended the decades-old fluorosis, a bone-crippling disease caused by high levels of fluoride in groundwater, in Munugode segment.
