Daughter in eye of storm for ‘running BMW over painter’ sleeping on Chennai pavement, who is YSRCP MP Rao

Born in Iskapalli village of Allur mandal of Nellore district, Rao is the chairman of BMR industries, one of the country’s largest exporters of shrimp. He entered into politics in the early 2000s with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and was elected as a Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituency (ZPTC) member from the neighbouring Bogol mandal.

Seen to be the first Yadav leader from the TDP in the district, Rao rose to prominence after gaining influence among the three numerically most significant communities – Yadavs (around 2.4 lakh), Muslims (2.2 lakh) and Matsyakaras (around 1 lakh) – in Nellore.

Rao went to neighbouring Gudur district to complete his schooling and was a classmate of fellow YSRCP MP V Vijayasai Reddy in Sri Venkateswara University (SVU).

He made his Assembly poll debut in 2009 from the Kavali segment, where he defeated the Congress’s Vishnuvardhan Reddy by around 19,000 votes. After his election as an MLA, he tasked his cousin Beedha Ravichandra, who was seen as close to TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu and was an MLC, with managing his cadre and other local issues as he went on to become the most prominent Yadav face of the TDP in the state.

“Ravichandra fell out with a section of the cadre over some issues and this dented Rao’s image among them. While Rao was the face of the TDP, he began to lose support among the cadre and hence he lost the 2014 Assembly elections to YSRCP’s Ramireddy Pratap Kumar Reddy,” a close aide of the MP said. Despite his loss in the Assembly elections, he was made the advisory member of the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) between 2014 and 2019.

In 2019, he was picked by the TDP as its nominee for the Nellore Lok Sabha seat but lost to Addala Prabhakar Reddy of the YSRCP amid the Jagan Mohan Reddy wave when the TDP was reduced to three Lok Sabha seats, even as the YSRCP also stormed to power in the state.

According to sources, after his defeat, Rao was eyeing a Rajya Sabha berth besides the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) chairman’s post.

“As the TDP did not accede to his demands, he switched over to the YSRCP in 2022, where he was immediately given a Rajya Sabha berth. Vijayasai Reddy was instrumental in bringing Rao into the YSRCP fold. It was the YSRCP’s idea to leave the TDP without a Yadav face in Nellore and they had tried to bring in Ravichandra, who had passed on the baton in Kavali to his brother Giri, into the YSRCP. However, due to his proximity to Naidu, Ravichandra and his family refused to give in,” a source said.

In the recent Assembly elections, sources said, Rao refused to support his former arch-rival and sitting Kavali MLA Pratap Reddy. “The YSRCP lost Kavali as Rao did not support the candidate over past differences. He has always been a TDP man. Even when he joined the YSRCP, he did not get his supporters along with him,” a YSRCP leader from Nellore claimed.

As an MP, Rao has served as a member of the Committee on Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Food Processing and the Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry besides the Joint Committee on Offices of Profit.