It seems that there is conspiracy being hatched to sideline the ‘firebrand’ Congress leader Renuka Chowdary from Khammam district politics, allege her supporters while referring to the sequence of incidents targeting Chowdary in the last couple of years.  From her firebrand nature to her high-profile connections, Chowdary has been a flamboyant leader in the local politics.

Ever since she shifted her loyalties from the TDP to the Congress in 1998, she made Khammam her political base and won the two consecutive Lok Sabha elections in 1999 and 2004. Chowdary’s sway over the district politics was intact even though she lost the 2009 election to the TDP’s Nama Nageswara Rao. Then the Congress high command made the firebrand leader a member of Rajya Sabha.

However, her feud with local leaders has remained unchanged. Her rival group allegedly led by Palair MLA Ramreddy Venkata Reddy has always branded her as a non-local and also an anti-Telanganite. Since then, a wordy duel between Chowdary’s supporters and rival group supporters has continued unabated to keep up the tension. With Chowdary already being the member of Rajya Sabha, a host of Congress leaders pinned their hopes on contesting from the Khammam Lok Sabha seat, which has a track record of returning non-local candidates to the Parliament.

But much to their surprise, Chowdary too threw her hat into the ring to contest the seat. In the end, the Congress gave away the seat to the CPI as part of poll pact.  When the war between the two groups appeared subsided, Bukya Kalavathi, wife of a local Congressman and tribal leader Dr Ramji Naik, came up with an allegation that in exchange of Rs 1.10 crore, Chowdary promised the Wyra ST reserved Assembly ticket to her husband for the last year’s general elections, which was not given to him.

Staging protests, Kalavathi made her presence felt at the two important meetings in which AICC leaders Koppula Raju and R C Khuntia were present apart from a host of legislators and other leaders. On both occasions, she submitted a representation seeking action against Chowdary. “There is no truth in Kalavathi’s allegations and also elections got over a year ago.

Where was she all these days? She is dancing to the tunes of some top leaders, who doesn’t like Chowdary’s presence in the district politics,” DCC official spokesperson Korivi Venkataratnam said and maintained that it was a conscious effort to tarnish Chowdary’s image.

Meanwhile, it is learnt that Chowdary has no information about last Tuesday’s review meeting in Khammam. Her supporters claim that it was clear-cut effort to isolate her from district politics but they are confident that she would bounce back into reckoning, against all odds.