By Oracle
After the blaring sirens and mikes fell silent and lofty promises of dole are continuing, albeit silently, take a deep breath and think through as to who said what.
KCR has come up clearly with his roadmap for Telangana 2.0, apart from the promise to continue all the schemes that he has been implementing. KCR has many things to claim credit for, already.
The Praja Kutami, which registered as ‘Mahakutami’ in the minds of people seems to have lost the battle even before it has fought. For, the coming together of the Congress and the TDP is like a mix of chalk and cheese. The staunch traditional voters of both parties cannot digest this odd combo and cast their vote in favour of the kutami.
The only person who could gel well with the Congress from the TDP is N Chandrababu Naidu, who claimed on the floor of the Assembly that he had 30 percent of Congress blood flowing in him. All others are finding the concoction untenable and inconvenient with no synergies whatsoever.
However, Naidu needs a political wheel-chair to move on in every election. This time it is the Congress, which has TJS and CPI as the footrests, that became the wheel-chair for Naidu. He rides on all of them, as we have all seen during the last few days.
It was Naidu who set the agenda for the very formation of the concoction and coerced all partners into it. It was he who chose an inconsequential Prof Kodandaram as the chairman of the committee to draft a common minimum program, which is contrary to the manifesto of the Congress in some important points – One lakh jobs in the first year vs one lakh jobs spread in five years; Rs 5 lakh and Rs 6 lakh grant vs loan (tried to make amends though, subsequently).
The kutami did a Ctrl A + Ctrl C + Ctrl V of most programs that are already under implementation or already implemented in Telangana under the TRS Government. Some of the promises were tweaked versions of KCR’s roadmap.
All this tweaking happened under the direction of Naidu, for he treats anybody’s policy or program as a white-labelled solution and rebrands the same and promotes as his original and he has his own media trumpets to blow the same at very high decibels.
Right from exporting Revanth Reddy from his party to the Congress, to pitting Lagadapati Rajagopal to broker a deal between the TRS and the TDP, and deflecting the same man to broach the idea of alliance with the Congress on anti-Modi plank, to deciding some crucial Congress tickets in the ongoing polls, to the copy-paste job and tweaking the manifestos and CMP, to making people like R Krishnaiah and Manda Krishna Madiga to support the kutami and get his long-term cohort K Narayana to “instruct” the Telangana CPI unit to join the alliance, it is Naidu who decided everything.
Rahul Gandhi with all the glory or lack of it – associated with the presidency of the 133-year-old Indian National Congress, first addresses “Chandrababu ji” at every joint public meeting, relegating the State Congress leaders to an insignificant position.
Thus, it is the story of a tail wagging the dog and not the other way round.