REPORTERS’ DIARY : KCR’s farmhouse is now his ‘simple’ residence

When Bharat Rashtra Samithi president K Chandrasekhar Rao was in power, both his farmhouse and official residence Pragati Bhavan were targets of opposition parties’ criticism and mud-slinging. There was much hullabaloo over ‘KCR staying always at the farmhouse’, which was then bandied about as extremely plush and swanky. Today, KCR is operating entirely from his farmhouse so much so that it is being referred to as his ‘Eravelli residence’. There is a steady stream of visitors to the farmhouse these days as the BRS chief has been meeting party cadre for giving constituency-wise pep talk. What is surprising to the cadre as well as other visitors is that it is ‘a simple house’. They vouch that even the room in which KCR has been conducting meetings is ‘merely a shed’. A little bird told us that, during the elections, when KCR was prompted to debunk the myths surrounding his farmhouse, he was like: ‘Why should I? Why would voters believe that I live luxuriously?’ Incidentally, Pragathi Bhavan, which had been hyped by opposition parties as “a ruler’s bungalow”, has lost its sheen now, with BRS taunting Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka to ‘expose’ all the claims made previously by the Congress, including the so-called ‘bullet-proof washrooms’ etc.