Kavitha’s Letter to KCR Exposes Rift Within BRS

It takes a particular kind of rupture for a daughter long cast in the role of loyalist to fault her father not in private, but in ink. K Kavitha’s letter to K Chandrashekar Rao is exactly that—a reckoning delivered not just across a table, but across a party in retreat.

The letter, dated May 2 and leaked weeks later, opens with the informal intimacy of “Daddy,” but the tone stiffens quickly. Over six handwritten pages, Kavitha, Member of the Legislative Council and daughter of the founder of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), lays out not a list of grievances but a devastating critique. The speech KCR delivered in Warangal for the party’s silver jubilee, she notes, lacked force. It omitted key issues—42 percent reservations for backward classes, Scheduled Caste categorisation, the Waqf Act amendments—that once animated the party’s base. Even the Urdu flourishes that KCR used to toss like petals into his oratory were missing. These absences, Kavitha suggests, were not just oversights. They were missed cues, lapses in connection, signals that something vital was slipping.

And perhaps something is. Once seen as the party that birthed a state, BRS now scrapes the margins. It was routed in the 2023 Assembly elections, reduced to 39 seats, and failed to recover momentum in the Lok Sabha polls that followed. KCR, who built the party with the stubbornness of a man willing to fast unto death for statehood, has found his voice trailing off. What Warangal revealed, and what Kavitha dares to underline, is the silence that now surrounds him.

There is a moment in the letter where she notes that even former Zilla Parishad chairpersons and MLAs can’t get appointments with her father. It is less a complaint than a diagnosis. The party, she seems to say, is no longer listening—not to its own, and not to its public. Kavitha’s letter does not so much incite rebellion as acknowledge what is already there: a party fatigued by its own routines, a leadership increasingly difficult to reach, a cadre that no longer knows where the centre is.

Kavitha praises the Warangal gathering for its scale. She admires his oblique jabs at Revanth Reddy and applauds his references to Operation Kagaar. But these lines of approval read like punctuation marks between harder truths. Her real argument lies in the shape of what was unsaid. She notes that KCR referred to BJP only in passing. This will be read as a gesture of proximity, she says, especially after the party abstained from contesting the recent MLC elections, ceding space to BJP without explanation.

While the letter is couched in concern for the party and filial candour, the political class—and many within the BRS—are reading it as a signal of her personal disquiet. The tone is corrective, but the subtext is unmistakably estranged. And in a party where dissent has historically travelled upward in whispers, this break in form is being interpreted by many as more than policy-level concern. It’s being read as a personal repositioning, possibly even as a prelude to her distancing herself from the current power structure within the BRS, particularly in the context of KTR’s consolidation. The subtext is Shakespearean: succession, stagnation, the tightening of the circle. For too long, Kavitha has hovered in the frame but never been foregrounded; useful in campaigns, poised in public, but seldom decisive. The letter rearranges that framing. It says: I see the cracks. And I can name them.

The leak of the letter, whether accidental or strategic, only amplifies the point. Kavitha is no novice in public life. She knew what the act of writing it would mean. This is not indiscretion. It is a deliberate rupture from the choreographed silences that typically hold Indian political families together.

The Congress, quick to seize on the opportunity, claimed the letter confirmed what it had always suspected: that the BRS and the BJP were engaged in an invisible handshake. In the opposition’s imagination, any softening of tone towards the BJP is grounds for conspiracy. And Kavitha’s intervention, highlighting precisely that softening, offers them a mirror.

The final irony may be that the daughter, once seen as too obedient to matter, is the only one willing to say what needs saying. Not to shame, maybe not even to challenge for the throne, but to salvage what remains of the edifice before the voters return.

BRSK Chandrashekar RaoK KavithaKCRZilla Parishad