The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have jointly deceived the five crore people of Andhra Pradesh on the special category status to the State, president of YSR Congress Party Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy has alleged.
“It’s very unfortunate that [the] TDP has failed to question the betrayal of the Centre about the promise made on the floor of Parliament,” said Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy on the outcome of the debate in the Rajya Sabha on a private member bill seeking the status. He expressed dismay over the Centre not implementing a decision taken by the Union Cabinet, during the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.
The TDP had no sincerity towards the people of AP as Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who also heads the party, had failed to even speak tough against the Centre even as Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in his reply to the debate, made it unequivocally clear that giving special status was not possible citing trivial reasons, said Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy at a press conference here on Saturday.
Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy said the YSRCP had given State bandh call for August 2 to expose the injustice heaped on AP by the TDP-BJP combine and it was time everybody joined hands to register their protest by supporting it. Responding immediately, AP Congress Committee president N. Raghuveera Reddy announced in Anantapur that they would support the bandh call.
Alleging that Mr. Naidu had softened his stand on special status after he was caught on tapes in the cash-for-vote scam related to MLC elections in Telangana, the YSR Congress chief reasoned that the fear of facing CBI in the large scale corruption in Pattiseema, Polavaram, Capital Region Development Authority, Amaravati and other projects might also have prompted him to slowdown on the demand. He pointed out how Narendra Modi, as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, had promised to keep the word on special status at an election rally at Tirupati before 2014 polls. Going a step further, Mr. Naidu had demanded in his election rallies that the special status was required for 15 years and not 5.
Further, Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy said according special status to a State was only an executive decision and not legislative, explained how the then Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee had given it to Uttarakhand with a stroke of pen and suggested that it could be done to AP too.
