Are the babus of Andhra Pradesh going to land the state in an embarrassing situation? A section of the ruling YSRCP in the state seems to believe so.
These leaders are fuming at bureaucrats in the state’s Industries Department revealing the list of invitees to the media in a bid to create “unnecessary hype” over the proposed Global Investors Summit to be held on 3-4 March in Visakhapatnam.
While it is conceivable that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has a good equation with Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, will grace the occasion, the list of other invitees looks a tad too ambitious.
It includes, according to unnamed bureaucrats who spoke to the media, such global heavyweights as Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
That apart, 15 Union ministers, 15 chief ministers, 44 global industrialists, and 53 Indian industry bigwigs — including Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Anand Mahindra, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Adi Godrej, Rishad Premji of Wipro, and N Chandrasekaran of Tata Son, among others — have been invited to the summit in Vizag. Not to speak of “ambassadors of several countries”.
“Where was the need to put all this out in the media?” one YSRCP leader said in a conversation with South First. No investor summit has ever attracted all these bigwigs at the same time. It would have been wiser to just announce the names of those accepted the invitation, he added.
The ruling party leader recalled how, when the TDP organised such summits when it was in power, the YSRCP was merciless in its criticism over the hyped-up events and their poor outcomes. In fact, the YSRCP had dubbed the TDP as an “event organiser”.
And now the boot will be on the other foot.
P.S.: A local wag had this thought — what if all the invitees did land up for the summit? Where would they park their planes?
