By Oracle
Funny are the ways of politicos, more so of Chandrababu Naidu and the Congress, when it comes to illusory softening of each others’ stands to mutually shower praises, thinking that voters have forgotten the past.
Naidu has surely tricked the Congressmen into praising him. Senior Congress leaders are finding it tough and embarrassing to massage the “virtues” of someone whom they fought tooth and nail for decades. Forced amnesia is becoming difficult for them to practice.
Telangana PCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy parried all questions on the alliance with Naidu’s TDP in a TV interview and came up with wayward replies. When the interviewer was persistent with his pointed and pertinent questions, the State Congress President almost gave up. He couldn’t field most questions on how the Congress could join hands with Naidu whom the party never spared in the last several years.
Same is the case with Jagitial Congress leader T Jeevan Reddy, a bitter critic of Naidu for three and a half decades. He tried to divert the questions asking as to what had KCR done to Telangana.
It’s no different with Congress veteran V Hanumantha Rao.
The Congress, despite being the major partner in the “accidental alliance”, is only craving for the “bait” thrown by the junior partner, TDP, at the former’s hour of financial crisis.
The CPI and Prof. Kodandaram’s party may turn out to be substitute cards for making the sequence complete in the alliance rummy.
Ideologies in gutters
Ideologies and principles, which were actually scanty, are now a passé for them. They have indeed thrown whatever is the remainder of so-called principles into gutters.
Naidu’s joining hands with the Congress in Telangana is part of his selfish and larger scheme of political design. By literally rubbing shoulders with Congress president Rahul Gandhi at H D Kumaraswamy’s swearing in ceremony a few months ago, Naidu began to implement his politics of appeasing his party’s long-term bête noire.
The Telangana Congress leaders were initially not at all clued about the machinations of Naidu and they couldn’t guess that he was trying to coax them into an unexpected “bear hug”. Without an iota of idea, the Telangana unit slipped into his snare, inextricably.
Typical of a wheeler-dealer politico he is, Naidu actually has nothing to gain or lose in Telangana. But he used the State as a political laboratory to experiment his tricky coalition with the Congress. The CPI and Telangana Jana Samiti are used only as catalysts in his experiment.
Larger scheme
His larger scheme is to garner whatever little percentage of votes that are left over of the irrevocably decimated Congress in the truncated Andhra Pradesh when the elections are held there in six months from now.
Naidu also is sensing some trouble for himself and his henchmen within and outside his party from the BJP and the Union Government. With a view to using the Congress and other political parties nationally as an armour to shield himself from the “expected” trouble, he did a quick round of knocking at the doors of every possible or potential political ally.
In the process, Naidu tried to portray as if KCR has to decide on which side he would be. However, KCR did not bite the bullet. He rejected or ignored it. A KCR way of snubbing.
Now, neck-deep into an undesired and unexpected alliance with the TDP, the Congress, which anyhow lost its hopes in Telangana, is now confused whether the alliance would make or mar its future.