New Delhi, January 5
With law and order having become the first priority in Andhra Pradesh, the Union Government today succeeded in persuading all participants attending the all-party meeting on Telangana to jointly issue an appeal for wider consultations.
Notwithstanding lack of consensus on the issue, almost all participants from eight political parties of Andhra Pradesh signed a joint appeal to maintain peace and assist the government in controlling law and order.
The only exception was TDP MLA from Telangana R Prakash Reddy who refused to sign the appeal. TDP’s Andhra MLA R Krishnadu, however, signed the appeal.
Most significantly, the government succeeded in getting TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao on board for holding wider consultations on the issue. In fact, Rao himself said he would speak to leaders of the CPI, the RJD and the NCP to push his case for creating Telangana.
Rao will meet Chidambram tomorrow.
The BJP and the CPI asked the government to bypass the process of moving a resolution in the Andhra Assembly and instead move the Telangana Bill in the coming Budget session of Parliament.
Later, BJP state president and leader of its two-member team Bandaru Datttatraya said, “The government did not come up with any road map or mechanism to create Telangana. Instead, it asked us to suggest the road map. We told them to introduce a Bill in the Budget session of Parliament.”
The BJP perhaps felt if the resolution was moved in the present assembly, it might be badly defeated since an overwhelming majority of MLAs happened to be from coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema and they favoured a united Andhra.
On its part, the Congress tried to rein its Telangana and United Andhra leaders by persuading them to tone down their strident tones on the issue. Most of them seemed to see the government’s point of view, sources said.
That was also, Congress sources said, because the leaders seemed to realise that the situation was fast getting out of their hands and the agitation was now passing into the hands of students and others on whom political leaders had no control.
The crux of the matter, as a senior Congress leader said, was to buy some time and in today’s meeting Home Minister P Chidambram seemed to have succeeded in doing precisely that.
