Pushed to Congress sidelines, Kiran Kumar Reddy steps out to play another innings in Andhra politics

Kiran served as the undivided Andhra Pradesh CM from November 25, 2010, till March 1, 2014. He had fiercely opposed the then Congress-led UPA dispensation’s move to bifurcate the state. While Rosaiah was heckled by supporters of Rajashekara Reddy’s son Jagan, who had been demanding that the latter be appointed as the CM, Kiran did not face such a blowback from them when he took charge.

A cricketer-turned-politician, Kiran is a four-time MLA, having won from Vayalpadu (merged with the Pileru Assembly constituency) in the 1989, 1999, and 2004 Assembly elections. In the 1994 polls, he lost to the TDP, but again won in 2009 from Pileru.

Kiran’s father Amarnatha Reddy was an MLA from Vayalpadu, who had won in 1972, 1978, and 1985. Amarnatha had also served as a Union minister in the Congress government led by P V Narasimha Rao.

After getting elected to the Andhra Assembly in 2004, Kiran was appointed the Congress’s chief whip in the House.

After winning the 2009 election, he was elected as the Andhra Assembly Speaker.

On February 19, 2014, as the UPA government made it clear that it was going ahead with AP’s bifurcation, an angry Kiran resigned as the CM and MLA as well as from the Congress. He submitted his resignation to then Governor ESL Narasimhan, who asked him to continue as the caretaker CM till April-May elections, following which Telangana came into existence on June 1 that year.

After quitting the Congress, Kiran floated his own political party, Jai Samaikya Andhra Party, with C Srihari Rao. Not known to be a leader or an orator, he along with his loyalists contested the 2014 elections on his fledgling party’s tickets, but they failed to win even a single seat. Kiran dissolved his party in 2018.

Following negotiations with the Congress and requests from its senior leaders including Rahul Gandhi, Kiran rejoined the grand old party in August 2018, hoping to get an important position. However nothing came his way — so much so that he was not even invited to the party’s Udaipur Chintan Shivir held in May 2022.

The last straw seemed to be Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge’s move to replace Sake Sailajanath with Gidugu Rudraraju as the Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president in November 2022. It was another matter that Kiran had anyways not been active in the Congress since his return.

A cricketer, Kiran’s classmates in Hyderabad Public School were former Indian cricket team captain Mohammed Azharuddin and actor Nanamuri Balakrishna. He also played for the Osmania University cricket team besides leading the Hyderabad Under-22 cricket team.