President's rule or a new CM? How Kiran Reddy has outwitted Cong

Hyderabad: N Kiran Kumar Reddy, while stepping down as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, has played King Gordius. He has tied such a complicated knot that the Congress has to do an Alexander and cut it, lest the noose tighten around its own neck. The resignation of Reddy and his insistence that he be discharged from the responsibilities of caretaker chief minister has trapped the Grand Old Party in a political maze. Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh indicated that the Congress was seriously discussing the issue, but left the subject hanging without providing any conclusive observation. The climax of the Congress soap opera always unfolds in the nick of time. [caption id=“attachment_1409557” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Kiran Reddy has put the Congress in a fix: PTI[/caption] Reddy’s resignation, has quite inadvertently, opened up the proverbial Pandora’s Box for the coveted position of the chief minister. Amid politics overcast by caste dynamics, the party has, over the last three years, almost eschewed the Reddy community and espoused Kapus instead. Though Union Minister of State K Chiranjeevi and APCC President Botcha Satyanarayana are engaged in a neck-and-neck race for the top job, the Congress also has many questions staring at it. By demitting the office Kiran Reddy hasn’t abdicated his responsibility, as it is being made out to be. He has, however, dug up a moat around the Congress fort in the state, not allowing the party to wriggle out of a quagmire. Can the Congress form a government on its own in the state? It doesn’t have sufficient numbers to even prove a simple majority. There are different interrelated scenarios that are complicating the situation. First of all, the Congress and the Union Government will have to have the President append his signature giving assent to the Andhra Pradesh Bifurcation Bill, 2013 that was passed by both Houses of Parliament. Then the President has to take a call on notifying the appointed date for the bifurcation of the state to take effect. The bureaucratic gristmill is churning the various issues involved in the process of creating a separate state, which will take a minimum of three months. Therefore, the appointed date could be around 1 June, by which time a new Assembly is supposed to be in place in Andhra Pradesh. In such a case, the elections must be held in the combined state in an as-is-where-is condition and only then the separation must be implemented, proportionately dividing the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies. However, Telangana Rashtra Samithi president K Chandrasekhar Rao has insisted that the elections should be held in two states, else the desired political advantage could not be derived. While some Seemaandhra Congress leaders solicited an endorsement from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to their standpoint that the polls for the Assembly be postponed by six months so that the party could be fortified in both regions, there has been an uproar against it. Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu, the YSR Congress and even the TRS very strongly opposed the proposal. Even Election Commission of India sources indicate that the election would be conducted simultaneously for the Lok Sabha and the Assembly. If the bifurcation is made effective earlier, the appointed date should be adjusted accordingly. This will enable the formation of two governments – one in Andhra Pradesh and one in Telangana. As far as Telangana is concerned, it may just be a formality for the Congress to install the new Government, though it will have to thrash out a lot of politically diabolical situations within and with the TRS. But it becomes a Herculean task for the party to have its chief minister in place in Andhra Pradesh to rule the residual period until the elections, for want of numbers. Ironically, no party has the numbers to have its own chief minister at the helm. The advancement of the appointed date would certainly trigger trouble in the administrative bifurcation too. Chandrababu Naidu asked as to why the government was not invoking Article 356 in Andhra Pradesh, as soon as the chief minister stepped down, when the same was implemented at a breakneck speed soon after the resignation of Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi. The Congress, which proposes to create two Pradesh Congress Committees in a week, is unable to make up its mind on who should be entrusted with the responsibilities of governance. The ruling party will be courting trouble by laying a trap and walking into it, if President’s Rule is imposed in the election time. It is important to have its man at the helm during elections, lest it be reduced to yet another player in the level-playing field. Had Kiran Reddy not pressed the eject button, the Congress would not have faced this piquant situation. The Congress managers surely did not play the last ball of the match well. Irritating the captain is turning out to be a costly mistake.