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KCR skips Mamata meet as Congress invited
KCR is understood to have told Mamata to keep the Congress away from the opposition parties’ meetings to discuss the presidential elections. “He was upset that Mamata had chosen to ignore his suggestion,” the TRS leader said.
Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) president and chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) abstained from the meeting convened by Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in New Delhi on Wednesday on the pretext that he won’t be a party to any discussion that involved the Congress, a TRS leader privy to the development said.
Till Tuesday evening, the Telangana chief minister did not take any decision on attending the meeting. “At one stage, there was a suggestion that he could depute one of the senior leaders of the party like former MP B Vinod Kumar or TRS secretary general and Rajya Sabha member K Kesava Rao to the meeting. But he decided against sending anybody at the last moment,” the party leader quoted above said.
Leaders of the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Left parties attended the meeting called by Banerjee. Leaders of Shiv Sena, Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI (Marxist), CPI (Marxist-Leninist), National Conference, People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Janata Dal (Secular), Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) also attended the deliberations, which took place on a day the nomination for the presidential election began.
KCR is understood to have told Mamata to keep the Congress away from the opposition parties’ meetings to discuss the presidential elections. “He was upset that Mamata had chosen to ignore his suggestion,” the TRS leader said.
The Telangana chief minister told the party leaders that the TRS should not deviate from its policy of maintaining equidistance from Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “If the TRS attends the meeting that has Congress representatives, it will send wrong signals to the people as well as the party cadre that we have joined hands with the Congress,” he said.
However, KCR told the party leaders that if the meeting convened by Mamata comes out with a consensus candidate who is non-controversial and acceptable to all, the TRS could take a call on supporting his or her candidature at a later stage, the above-cited leader said.
Political analyst Sangem Ramakrishna said it is apparent that KCR doesn’t want to be in the company of the Congress in any manner at a time when he is all set to float a new national party as an alternative to the BJP. “KCR won’t join any group that has either the Congress or the BJP because he is of the view that only he can take on the national parties,” he said.
The TRS chief has already given up his original plan of floating a federal front of regional parties for which he had held several meetings with leaders like Banerjee, M K Stalin, Hemant Soren, Akhilesh Yadav, Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and H D Deve Gowda.
At the party plenary held in April this year, KCR said these fronts or groups had no relevance as such experiments had failed in the past. “What we want now is not an alternative political front to pull down someone from power and install somebody else as the Prime Minister. We want an alternative political and economic agenda,” he said.
Telangana Congress Committee president A Revanth Reddy said the fact that KCR had abstained from the meeting convened by Mamata Banerjee clearly showed that the TRS has a nexus with the BJP.
“Till the other day, KCR was calling upon the opposition parties to join hands to pull down Narendra Modi from power. When Mamata took the initiative, why didn’t he attend the meeting? I suspect the TRS will abstain from voting in the Presidential elections, thereby indirectly helping the BJP candidate,” the PCC chief said.
