Telangana: Decoding the Congress gameplan in Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh’s Panchayati Raj minister Jana Reddy was the butt of jokes at the protest venue at Indira Chowk in Hyderabad on Monday. Jana Reddy’s refusal to resign from the state cabinet was interpreted by votaries of Telangana as his desperation to make it to the chief minister’s chair in case the Congress decided to declare Kiran Kumar Reddy’s innings at the crease. Jana Reddy, for those who do not know his CV, is by popular consensus, a journalist’s nightmare because more often than not, he speaks in an extremely convoluted manner, which leave you wondering what he said. He was Andhra Pradesh’s home minister when the naxals walked out of the forests for peace talks with the Y S Rajasekhara Reddy government in 2004. After dealing with Jana as the government interlocuter, the outlaws perhaps found the jungle life less frustrating and abandoned the peace process. Jana, by virtue of being a Reddy from Telangana, seniority and administrative experience, fancies himself as a serious chief ministerial aspirant. And has been making enough trips to Delhi to ensure he is in the radar of any package the High command decides on for the state. [caption id=“attachment_606355” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Kiran Kumar Reddy. Image: ibnlive[/caption] Jana’s dreams are not a state secret in Hyderabad or in Delhi. None of the Congress ministers want to quit either because in case, the resignations are accepted, they would be reduced to political nobodies. Worse, they would be at the mercy of K Chandrasekhar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti and they know the top rungs of the ladder in that party are already occupied by KCR’s kith and kin. And three, in the event of Congress granting Telangana anytime in the near future, they would find it difficult to trace their steps back into the party. While the ministers have flatly refused to resign, the MPs are busy playing out a charade. Seven of them, who have been called to Delhi by Vayalar Ravi on Wednesday, plan to give in their resignation letters to Sonia Gandhi, requesting 10 Janpath’s postal service to send it to Meira Kumar. They would hope the snail mail never reaches the Lok Sabha Secretariat. Do I hear them whispering “Aal izz well, Aal izz well’”? They know all won’t be well for them in Telangana since they would be the target of attack from TRS and other pro-Telangana organisations. And flashing these resignation letters would hardly help them save their skin. But contrary to what most believe, the Congress is playing to a plan in Andhra Pradesh. It may not fetch them electoral dividends in Telangana but the strategy seems to be to occupy the ‘United Andhra Pradesh’ political space that has been vacated by TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu. Which is why Naidu is being pilloried as the villain of the piece in Seemandhra regions for having said a vague ‘yes’ to Telangana. The plan also is to cut Jagan to size so that he does not run away with the Seemandhra seats, as opinion polls suggest his party would. It is significant that PCC chief Botsa Satyanarayana attended the anti-bifurcation meeting in Rajahmundry last week. Though he now claims he went there to do ‘political management’, anyone who follows and understands Congress politics will tell you that such events at such a sensitive juncture would not happen without the High command’s blessings. Simultaneously, the Congress is also encouraging its leaders to attack KCR. On Monday, the TRS chief was very critical of the Congress and blamed everyone - from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Sonia Gandhi - for the mess. “The Congress had become a curse for Telangana. First it was Nehru, then Indira Gandhi killed people and now Sonia Gandhi is crushing us,’’ he said. KCR also used language unbecoming of a leader for Dr Manmohan Singh, provoking an angry reaction from Kiran Kumar Reddy. Asking KCR to mind his language, the CM tried to put him down as “after all the leader of a sub-regional party.’’ Kiran wasn’t the only one. Rajahmundry MP Arun Kumar, a known KCR baiter, ridiculed his attempts to divide the state. Even Nizamabad MP Madhu Yashki Goud, who till recently was close to KCR, is now seeking to demolish his stature as the sole spokesperson of the region. Such pinch-hitting in the last overs, the Congress hopes, will help it demolish the TRS in Telangana. While it knows it has lost significant ground in Telangana, the party plans to test how well this strategy works to help it regain lost ground in Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra. If it does in the next few months, the Congress could take a position against bifurcation and offer a development package instead. If it does not, it can carve out Telangana closer to elections and ride on that wave to do well in the region. It is a gamble the Congress is taking, with high chances it may come a cropper in 2014. Having read the writing on the wall, the party is trying to rewrite the script, with new twists to the tale. The risk is that the script could well be its epitaph in Telangana.