But the chief minister has to stop a BJP surge in Telangana if he wants to emerge as a serious player at the national level.
Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao. (Supplied)
Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao is now in Delhi, rolling the political dice to put the BJP on the mat, in furtherance of his ambitious plan of playing an important role in national politics.
The chief minister, who has been trying to drum up support for his battle with the BJP from various opposition parties, is now taking an active role. He is identifying the issues that could be used as weapons against the Centre and, in this endeavour, he is trying to enlist the support of all non-BJP and non-Congress parties.
He has already asked his MPs in both the Houses of Parliament to join hands with the anti-BJP and anti-Congress parties and take the BJP to the cleaners on several issues, including the imposition of GST even on dairy products and bread. The MPs had been asked to enlist support from them on promises made to Telangana in the AP State Reorganisation Act of 2014.
Already, the Telangana leader is fuming at the Centre for trying to cripple the state financially by classifying off-budget borrowings as state debt as long as their servicing is done from the state budget.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently made no bones about the classification of such debts, which the TRS reads as financial witch-hunting. If off-budget borrowings are classified as state debt, then the borrowing capacity of the state would go down.
The state’s loans cannot go beyond 4 percent of the GSDP under the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act. The Centre already has the state over a barrel, by cutting the borrowing limit by ₹15,000 crore for the current fiscal. The Centre had declared the state’s cumulative debt at ₹3.12 lakh crore at the end of the current financial year after the new classification is applied to the state’s debt.
The chief minister wants to use the new norm in the classification of the debts as the glue to keep the opposition parties united to launch his battle against the Centre.
This apart, the TRS chief also wants to make his displeasure known over the Centre not announcing any relief for the Godavari floods. Though a central team has only just visited, the TRS camp is sceptical of any releases because the Center did not pay even a red cent when floods had rocked Hyderabad in 2022.
Another contentious issue that KCR will be taking up with the Centre would be the public sector funding agencies suddenly coming up with the rider that the state would have to secure guarantees from the Union government for release of the remainder of the loans the state awaits for its projects.
The TRS argues that when the government had signed agreements with these funding agencies, this condition was not in force and now questions how they could insist on them which it considers is nothing but arm-twisting.
KCR is planning big to paint the BJP as Telangana’s villian and tarnish its image to the extent possible before he takes it on in the next elections scheduled to be held in Decmeber next year.
Realising that rattling off invectives at the prime minister sitting in Hyderabad might not cut ice with the people, he appears to have decided to use Delhi as the launch pad for his attack on the saffron party. This would make him seem as a leader waging a bitter war against the Centre, the optics of which are necessary for him to gain an upper hand in the next assembly elections.
Though KCR has national ambitions, he is now more concerned about the assembly elections in the state next year. For him to emerge as a major force at the national level before the Lok Sabha elections arrive in 2024, he would have to win the state assembly election decisively, or no one would take him seriously.
He now wants to come up with an anti-BJP agenda with a USP that jells with the people, such as the amendment sought to be made to the central electricity Act which makes it mandatory for the state governments to install metres to agriculture pumpsets, direct transfer of funds to the panchayats much against the government’s opposition to it.
The chief minister is also understood to be contemplating making the BJP taste its own medicine on the issue of enhancement of reservations to education and employment to the tribals. The BJP which is hogging the limelight for making a tribal woman the President of India would now have to answer the uncomfortable questions of why it had remained silent on the enhancement of reservations though the state had already sent a bill to this effect in 2017.
The state assembly passed the bill proposing increasing reservation to the tribals from 6 percent to 10 percent but no action has followed so far.
Exposing the BJP on this count is all the more important for him as the BJP is already going to town in districts where tribals constitute a significant chunk of the population such as the erstwhile Adilabad district, explaining how much the saffron party cared for the tribals.
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
