Why President's Rule in Andhra is yet another Congress mistake

Hyderabad: The Indian National Congress, the creator of all promises and pitfalls in a democratic India, pushed its granary of votes – Andhra Pradesh – into the President’s Rule for a second time in 58 years of the existence of the state.

The first time the state went under President’s Rule was from 11 January, 1973 to 10 December the same year, when PV Narasimha Rao was ejected out of the chief ministership following ‘Jai Andhra’ agitation.

The state will officially retire from its existence this time, in accordance with its retirement rules – 58 years. In this case, it could be a compulsory premature retirement a few months before it attains the actual age of ‘superannuation’.

Andhra Pradesh was the first state formed on linguistic basis on 1 November, 1956.

The people of Andhra Pradesh rallied behind the Congress, in spite of the entire opposition ganging up against it and fighting the elections in 2009, and renewed their faith in the party by re-electing the incumbent governments both at the Centre and in the state.

Ironically, the Grand Old Party (GOP) of India, offered ingratitude in reciprocation – not by granting statehood to satiate the six-decade-long urge of the denizens of Telangana and also not by rejecting the plea of the people of Seemandhra to keep the state united – by imposing President’s Rule, ignoring the option to install a popular government.

The Congress has kept shooting itself in the foot ever since the sudden demise of its tallest state leader YS Rajasekhara Reddy, the first Congress chief minister to have secured a renewal of popular endorsement to the party, since 1983. This hampered the economic progress the State witnessed for close to a decade until then.

(The Congress was never returned to power in two consecutive elections after the advent of the Telugu Desam Party, which achieved this feat once under NTR and once under N Chandrababu Naidu.)

Its first mistake was to install then Finance Minister K Rosaiah in the chief minister’s gaddi.

YSR Reddy himself had Rosaiah elected to the Legislative Council, instead of making him contest a direct election. This is a barometer of Rosaiah’s popular image.

Had the Congress yielded ground to the demand of YS Jagan to be enthroned as the successor of his deceased father, it could have:

1. contained the resurrection of the Telangana agitation under the aegis of Telangana Rashtra Samithi; and 2) run a government riding a roughshod on anyone sticking their neck out.

Instead, the party proffered the candidacy of Rosaiah to the people as an interim chief minister and vacillated on whether or not to continue with him in the corner office.

This came as a proverbial shot in the arm for K Chandrasekhar Rao, who had been waiting for an opportune time to strike big. Meanwhile, the mandarins at 10 Janpath successfully antagonized YS Jagan.

Once the Congress pulled out underdog N Kiran Kumar Reddy and sent Pranab Mukherjee to ensure the former’s coronation, Jagan lost no time in quitting the party and floating his own outfit, suffixing it again with the ‘Congress’.

There may be divergent views on whether Jagan indulged in corrupt practices under the shadow of his father’s tall political silhouette, as the matter is now sub judice, but the Congress surely got its hands dirty.

It, wittingly or unwittingly, forgot the age-old adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in bush. In chasing YS Jagan with criminal cases for defalcation of funds and graft through quid pro quo deals, the Congress surely ran with the hare and hunted with the hound, invoking the apex investigating agency, the CBI, against him.

At the same time, it let Jagan and the main Opposition TDP raise pointers at each other that they had a ‘behind-the-scene’ nexus with the Congress.

Circumstances that unfolded – like the TDP ‘forgetting’ to field a contestant against the Congress nominee in the Legislative Council elections in Kadapa district, its neutral stand during the no-confidence motion moved by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and the YSR Congress on 15 March 2013 – lent credence to the YSR Congress’s charge that the ruling party had entered into an underhand dealing with the TDP.

Similarly, the charge of the TDP that YS Jagan was let out on bail – even if it were to be after 16 months of incarceration – and the immediate utterances of Sabbam Hari, Congress MP, that the party bailed Jagan Reddy out and the latter would, in return, support the GOP in making it to power once again buttressed the TDP’s charge that it indeed had an unholy arrangement with the tainted Kadapa MP.

With their unabated vilification campaign against Jagan, the TRS and the TDP also pushed the ruling party into a quandary. With weak-kneed leaders at the helm, the party could not hold its flock together either.

In announcing the bifurcation too, the party could not derive the political mileage it ought to actually have. Instead of placating KCR and winning him over onto its side, it began to isolate him soon after the Parliament passed the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill, 2013, by enticing the estranged and the dissident TRS leaders into its fold.

Emboldened by the massive success of his rally, KCR and his followers too apparently decided to cock a snook at the Congress. The Congress acquired the discredit of being unable to install a popular government on the eve of elections in the State – remember its last Chief Minister packed a punch by quitting.

Taking the decision to create Telangana and pushing it through in the Parliamentary procedure on its own initiative is one for the books, but it’s KCR who will always be remembered for this feat by all – and even derisively by some.

Yet it’s hard to find some overriding significance in the apparent waxing and waning of aesthetic sophistication in the fluctuations in the Congress way of dealing with piquant political situations.’

If the TRS doesn’t come around, it amounts to the Congress committing a political hara-kiri in both regions which are soon-to-be states.