The grapevine says that the chief minister was very much annoyed over the release of the contents of the caste census ahead of the Cabinet meeting and the special Assembly session.
Published Feb 04, 2025 | 12:38 PM ⚊ Updated Feb 04, 2025 | 12:38 PM
Chief Minister Revanth Reddy and Minister Sridhar Babu. (TelanganaCMO/ X)
Synopsis: The data of the caste census done by the Telangana government was released recently. However, sources say that it was released without the knowledge of the chief minister, who is angry over it. The chief minister wanted it to be tabled in the state Assembly before its public release.
Is there “too much democracy” in Congress? Sometimes, the leaders are proud of the high quotient of democracy that exists in the party, it seems. There are a lot of instances when party leaders shoot off with their mouths, without even thinking if it would embarrass the party leadership.
One such incident happened in Telangana. Congress is taking pride in the Caste census report that was made public last Sunday (2 February). Sources, however, suggest that the report was made public without the knowledge of Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy.
The grapevine says that the chief minister was very much annoyed over the release of the contents of the caste census ahead of the Cabinet meeting and the special Assembly session.
He was sore that the thoughtless action had given the Opposition a handle to slam the party. The BRS and the BJP hit the Congress ruthlessly with a sledge-hammer.
The egregious blunder occurred at a time when the chief minister was trying to salvage whatever remained of the Congress’s image after an online poll on Revanth Reddy’s governance went horribly wrong.
At the end of the day, those who voted in the poll preferred the BRS’ “farmhouse” rule, implying that it was much better than the rule of the incumbent government. The poll result had a numbing effect on the party and it is yet to recover from it.
The chief minister was reportedly angry with the officials for not advising the ministers not to release the contents of the caste census. He was unhappy that the ministers too did not know that reports of this nature, which add sheen to the party, should be released this way in utter disregard for the consequences.
A more ominous possibility was whether the minister deliberately released the report to take the lion’s share of the credit for the report.
Once bitten twice shy, Revanth Reddy had a media conference called by the Cabinet sub-committee headed by Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy, cancelled on Monday, 3 February.
It was organised to release the report of the commission which went into sub-categorisation of the Scheduled Caste (SC) communities. It was clear he did not want a repeat of what happened with the caste census. For a Congress chief minister, governance is always like pussy-footing around a political minefield, not knowing when he would step on a booby trap or a pressure mine.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
