On Friday, Congress leader and former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin took the oath of office as Telangana cabinet member. In a previous statement, the Raj Bhawan stated that Governor Jishnu Dev Varma would administer Azharuddin’s oath as a minister on Friday morning.
The BJP expressed their disagreement to Azharuddin’s appointment to the Telangana cabinet, which sparked a controversy. According to BJP’s Shashidhar Reddy, “the proposal to give Mohd Azharuddin a cabinet berth is nothing but an attempt to get the votes of a section of the voters in the upcoming Jubilee Hills by-election and a gross violation of the model code of conduct.”
The idea to include Azharuddin in the state cabinet would negatively impact the by-election in the Jubilee Hills constituency, where the former cricket player is a voter, he claimed, even if the model code of conduct did not apply to the entire city of Hyderabad. In the 2023 assembly elections, Azharuddin ran as a candidate from the Jubilee Hills constituency, as Shashidhar Reddy also noted.
He said that the Congress was only trying to curry favor with a portion of the Jubilee Hills assembly constituency’s constituents by promising him a ministry. In response to the opposition from the BJP, Syed Nizamuddin, a spokesman for the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC), accused the saffron party and Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) of working together to prevent Azharuddin from being included in Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy’s cabinet. He described the complaint as an attempt to deny minorities political representation.