Danam Nagender: Man of the masses

Hyderabad: Khairatabad MLA Danam Nagender has been a mass leader with a strong base in Hyderabad, which made him popular to win six times as the member of Telangana Legislative Assembly.

The 65-year-old politician from the city started his political career in the Congress party and went on to become a senior leader and MLA. Following in the footsteps of his political guru P Janardhan Reddy, Danam Nagender to his credit has a hat-trick of victories from Asifnagar Assembly constituency in the city.

Born to a family of freedom fighters D Linga Murthy and Lakshmi Bai on August 9, 1958, Danam Nagender is a post graduate from Madurai Kamaraj University. He is involved in social work and also in real estate business, besides having agricultural trade.

The locals in the constituency say that he is accessible every day irrespective of whether elections are round the corner or not. It is a routine for the MLA to hold meetings with the people of his constituency every day early in the morning, where he would listen to their problems and try to solve them by talking to officials, which makes him popular in the area.

Nagender’s journey as elected representative started with the Congress party winning the Asifnagar (which was later made as Nampally in the delimitation) in 1994. He went on to win the election three times consecutively from this segment including 1994, 1999 and 2004. Interestingly, just before the 2004 elections, he had joined Telugu Desam Party after he was denied a ticket by the Congress party and won the election. However, he later resigned and contested unsuccessfully in the bye election on the Congress ticket in the same year.

After the delimitation of constituencies, Nagender contested from Khairatabad Assembly segment in 2009 and was victorious. Nagender has served as a minister in the undivided Andhra Pradesh in the cabinet of former Chief Ministers YS Rajasekhara Reddy and K Rosaiah with portfolios of Health, Labour and Employment, Training.

In the 2014 general elections, Nagender had to face defeat in the hands of BJP’s Chintala Ramachandra Reddy with the alliance of Telugu Desam and BJP. However, he bounced back in 2018 by winning for the fourth time from Khairatabad after joining the BRS in June 2018. He had defeated Chintala with a margin of over 28,400 votes and emulated PJR by entering Assembly for the record fifth time like his political guru PJR.

The Khairatabad MLA joined the Congress party after it came to power in the 2023 elections. He also had contested unsuccessfully from the Secunderabad Lok Sabha constituency where the BJP candidate G Kishan Reddy defeated him with a margin of over 49,000 votes.