HYDERABAD: Bharat Rashtra Samithi MP Borlakunta Venkatesh Netha and former Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) trust board member Manne Jeevan Reddy on Tuesday resigned from the K Chandrashekar Rao-led party and joined the Congress in New Delhi.

“I was impressed by the six guarantees being implemented by the Revanth Reddy government. Hence, I decided to quit the BRS to join the Congress,” Netha, a first-time Lok Sabha MP from Peddapalli, said as they were welcomed into the Congress by general secretary KC Venugopal in the presence of several Telangana Congress leaders including PCC president and chief minister A Revanth Reddy and deputy chief minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka.

Netha expects a Congress ticket from the Peddapalli Lok Sabha seat in the 2024 elections. Last week, another senior BRS lawmaker from the Station Ghanpur assembly constituency and former deputy chief minister Thatikonda Rajaiah resigned from the party. He is also likely to join the Congress and is negotiating a ticket for Warangal Lok Sabha seat.

A BRS leader familiar with the development said Netha defected to the Congress following reports that BRS would drop seven of the nine sitting BRS MPs in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Telangana has 17 Lok Sabha seats. He said KCR may field only two sitting MPs, G Ranjith Reddy from Chevella and Nama Nageshwar Rao from Khammam.

Of the remaining seven, Medak MP Kotha Prabhakar Reddy has already resigned from the Lok Sabha following his election to the state assembly from Dubbak.

The remaining six MPs – Venkatesh Netha from Peddapalli, Pasunoori Dayakar from Warangal, Manne Srinivas Reddy from Mahabubnagar, B B Patil from Zaheerabad, Pothuganti Ramulu from Nagarkurnool and Malothu Kavitha from Mahabubabad – may not get the party tickets again.

A party leader said three other MPs, who are unlikely to get a party ticket to contest the election, are expected to cross over to the Congress in the hope of greener pastures.

KCR is contemplating major changes in the list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, a move that is described as one of the lessons that the former chief minister is said to have learnt from the BRS’s stunning defeat in December last year. In the assembly elections, KCR had retained 95% of the sitting legislators.

During review meetings between January 3 and 22, a majority of BRS leaders had also pitched against repeating sitting candidates in the Lok Sabha elections given the public sentiment against them.