“Congress ko khatam karo,Telangana hasil karo” protesters chant
N Nagaraja Rao
THE Centre’s decision of taking more time to resolve the Telangana issue has raised tempo of the Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) decided to politically boycott the Congress in Telangana to bring pressure on its leaders and force them to quit the party. TJAC chairman M Kodandaram declared that Telangana organisations would not associate with Congress leaders in any manner or invite them to any agitation programmes. The Congresss current political arithmetic in Andhra is tricky. If it doesn”t grant Telangana, it could be politically wiped out in this region. The logic being that granting Telangana would at least hold the party in good stead here. However, the creation of a Telangana state would also create problems for the party in the regions of Rayalseema and Andhra where the demand for a United Andhra is on, and the agitation is slowly gaining ground. Congress party advanced a strange logic that it needs still more time to resolve a sensitive issue of statehood, but questions are being asked why it is in deep slumber to resolve a sensitive issue since decades. The tempers ran high over Congress General Secretary incharge of Andhra Pradesh Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad stated that no time frame can be chalked out and they would call the PCC Chief and the state Chief Minister and discuss. This statement was at best most irresponsible and also evasive.
Hyderabad and the other Telangana districts continued to reverberate with protests and preventive arrests on this week even as the Samara Deeksha held by the pro-Telangana outfits vowed to step up the agitation in view of the Congress-led UPA government opting to keep on dithering on the issue.The Telangana leaders including TRS supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao said the agitations would include blocking the national and state highways linking Telangana to the other two regions and issued an ultimatum to the Congress elected representatives from the region including ministers to immediately quit their posts and the party or face the wrath of the Telangana people. It may be recalled that a all party convened by the Home Minister Mr Sushilkumar Shinde in New Delhi on December 28, 2012, assured to resolve the vexed issue of statehood with in a month.
Addressing demonstrators at the conclusion of the 36-hour Samara Deesksha (Mass protest) TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao too announced that the agitation for separate state would continue till the objective is achieved. The diatribes and the choicest epithets to target the Congress continued unabated. “The Prime Minister is worse than the chaprasi who works in Parliament. The chaprasi knows better how intense the Telangana movement is,” he said. Amid cheers he declared “From Jawaharlal to Indira and then to Sonia ,the statehood of Telangana remained unresolved and the people of Telangana were cheated by all the three generations.” “The Congress MPs and MLAs are losing respect because of Delhi’s political hypocrisy. People are calling them cheats, If I were a Congress MP, I would by now have committed suicide,” he said.
