Sridhar Babu

Sridhar Babu won on the Congress ticket from Manthani in the 1999 elections, though his Congress party was relegated to sitting in the opposition. He defeated his nearest rival Chandrupatla Ram Reddy by a margin of over 15,000 votes.[8]

By the time Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy undertook his padayatra in 2003, Sridhar Babu was the Karimnagar district party president.[9] In the 2004 elections, in which the Congress Party gained power, he defeated the TDP candidate, Somarapu Satyanarayana, by a margin of 42,560 votes.[10] He became a Government Whip in the 12th Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly.[11]

He was re-elected in the 2009 Assembly Elections defeating Putta Madhu of the erstwhile Praja Rajyam Party by a margin of over 13,000 votes.[12] He was the only Congress MLA to be re-elected in 2009 from Karimnagar district, amidst a strong showing from an alliance of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and Telugu Desam Party.

Babu was appointed a member of Y. S. Reddy's cabinet in May 2009[7] as minister for Higher Education and NRI affairs. After serving the ministry for 1.5 years he moved to the Civil Supplies and Legislative affairs ministry in Kiran Kumar Reddy's cabinet. He resigned from the cabinet on 2 January 2014 after Reddy divested him of his Legislative Affairs portfolio when the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill, which concerns the creation of a separate Telangana state, was being discussed in the Assembly.[13]

Sridhar Babu won a hard-fought election in 2018,[14] and won with a majority of 16,230 votes against his TRS rival.[15] The Telangana CM KCR had called for an early election in September 2018 by dissolving the assembly a good 8 months before its tenure throwing the opposition parties into a tizzy.[16] The Congress party had high hopes of dethroning the ruling TRS and allied itself with the TDP, TJS and CPI to forge a grand alliance. However, the TRS rode back to power and Sridhar Babu was one of the only 19 MLAs who won on the Congress party ticket.