The defectors blame the party leadership both at the state and national levels for their decision to quit Congress and join TRS.
Hyderabad: The Congress high command faces a piquant situation as 12 of its defected MLAs in Telangana dared it to face by-elections in case the High Court disqualifies them. The defectors had blamed the party leadership both at the state and national level for their decision to quit the party and join the ruling TRS, throwing political challenge to the high command to handle the crisis.
The HC bench headed by Acting Chief Justice Raghavendra Chauhan and Shameem Akhtar, who are hearing petitions challenging the notification issued by Telangana Assembly Speaker Pocharam Srinivas Reddy last week merging the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) with TRS, on Tuesday issued notices to 12 defected MLAs, the Speaker, among others, on the issue. The next hearing is posted to 12 July.
On the political front, remaining CLP Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka sat on a hunger strike on the Assembly premises in Hyderabad on Saturday, but he was shifted to the NIMS hospital where he ended his stir after three days on the advice of the high command. The Congress wanted to intensify the stir by taking the support of other Opposition parties, but couldn’t due to lack of a required political steam.
Countering the Congress leaders, the 12 defectors had appeared before a media conference on Wednesday and made it clear that they had changed the party only because of lack of proper leadership in the party both at the state and national level. “We are ready to go for by-elections, if the Congress too is ready,” said Gandra Venkata Ramana Reddy, Bhupalapally MLA, speaking for the MLAs.
Reddy as well as other MLAs, who spoke on the occasion, blamed the Congress leadership for its failure to lead the party during and after the elections. The Congress won 19 out of the 119 MLAs in Telangana in the 7 December 2018 election. “We should have won the 2014 elections, as it was we who gave Telangana state, but sad enough, we have lost the elections five years later,” Reddy said.
Ramana Reddy and Vanama Venkateswara Rao, Kothagudem MLA, said that Congress in Telangana was divided into three groups and each has been backed by their mentors at the central level and the party top leadership had never bothered to check the ground situation. “They (high command) still continue to behave as if they are in power at the Centre,” Rao told this newspaper.
Though the process of Congress MLAs joining the ruling party has begun days after the election results were announced on 13 December, the leadership hadn’t bothered to find out the position from the legislators or persuaded them to remain in the party, the defected MLAs told this newspaper. “Absolutely, there was no effort to stop us,” Rao and Reddy said.
“The only one question they (CLP leader or the PCC president Uttam Kumar Reddy) asked us was how many more would be going to TRS, or they wanted to know what kinds of offers were made to us,” said Atram Sakku, Asifabad (ST) MLA. It appeared to the defector MLAs that the party had not bothered to retain them and theyalso hinted that the high command was still not accessible to the legislators and if any of them had to meet party president Rahul Gandhi, they will have to approach through a powerful leader who had access to the high command. “This is a culture prevalent in the good old days when Congress was in power at the state and the Centre; now nothing is changed,” Sakku said.
On the other hand, the TRS leadership made it clear that they hadn’t made any efforts to woo the Congress MLAs. “The Congress MLAs on their own came to us expressing their faith in the leadership of our leader KCR; how can we deny their request to work with us?” asked TRS working president K.T. Rama Rao. The same was stated by Animal Husbandry Minister Talasani Srinivas Yadav last week. The defected Congress MLAs had refuted the charge that they were sold out to the ruling party by taking “money bags”.
“We strongly deny this allegation and we are ready to face by-elections in case the HC says our defections are wrong. Whatever we have done is as per the Constitution and as per the prevailing political practices in the country,” Venkata Ramana Reddy said.
Now that the HC had issued notices to them, the Speaker and the secretary of the Assembly, the defector MLAs are planning to file separate affidavits explaining the circumstances that led to their defections and state that they had enough numbers—two thirds—to engineer a merger of the party as per the 10th Schedule of the Constitution.
The Congress also stares at the prospects of facing by-elections in case the HC strikes down the merger and disqualifies the MLAs or even if the TRS leadership wants to take the moral high ground by going to the people. The Congress, in fact, is in an upbeat mood after it won three MPs out of the total 17 in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
But, the subsequent elections to the Panchayat Raj bodies dealt a blow to the party as it had lost all the 32 zilla parishads to the ruling TRS and scored a poor figure in the block level bodies too. The TRS wants to convert the upcoming by-election to Huzurnagar Assembly seat, necessitated by the resignation of Uttam Kumar Reddy who was elected to Lok Sabha from Nalgonda seat into a referendum on the defections. TRS wants to field Saidi Reddy who lost the December Assembly elections from here again, while Congress is yet to decide its candidate.