Congress mounts pressure on rebels
Hyderabad: The Rajya Sabha election has been turned into a battleground by the Seemandhra Congress leaders and the party high command, each trying to outwit the other.
This game of one-upmanship is grossly undermining the prestige of the Upper House. While Rajya Sabha is supposed to be a House of elders, with a fair sprinkle of intellectuals from various fields, the political exigency rather than ability has become the criterion for selection of candidates by all the political parties.
The Congress high command has picked its candidates - K V P Ramachandra Rao, T Subbarami Reddy M A Khan - purely on political grounds to counter threat from rebel candidates from Seemandhra region. The Telugu Desam Party, too, has selected its candidates - Garikapati Mohan Rao and Sita Ramalakshmi - on the grounds of loyalty to the party and caste equations.
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi, too, has followed the same principle in selecting K Kesava Rao. In fact, barring the TDP, all the other parties have ignored the gender justice and did not give ticket to woman candidates.
Particularly, the Congress which has been shouting from rooftops about women's quota in the elected bodies has conveniently ignored this aspect. The TDP made an appreciable move by fielding a woman candidate.
However, all the three parties - the Congress, the TDP and the TRS - still continue to operate in a cartel to see that their candidates get elected unopposed by bringing pressure on three independent candidates who filed their nominations for Rajya Sabha seats on Tuesday.
While rebel Congress leaders Chaitanya Raju and Adala Prabhakar Reddy filed their papers as independents, another candidate Jajula Bhaskar also filed nomination as an independent.
If these rebels remain in the fray till the polling day, February 7, voting would become inevitable and Congress high command would face a tricky situation.
It has to put extra efforts to see that the official nominees win the elections. Soon after the nomination process came to a close, the Congress leadership swung into action to bring pressure on rebels to withdraw from the race and on MLAs who supported them to take back their support.
Within a couple of hours, three legislators R Varaprasad, Mutyala Papa and K Murali withdrew the support to their candidate Chaitanya Raju and gave letters to the Legislative Secretariat accordingly.
Similarly, three other legislators - Neeraja Reddy, Seshu and Vijay also submitted similar letters withdrawing support to Adala Prabhakar Reddy.
Sources said some more MLAs might withdraw their support to the rebels by Thursday, the last date for withdrawal of nominations. The chief electoral officer is consulting the Election Commission of India on how to deal with the situation.
The high command is also bringing pressure on Prabhakar Reddy and Chaitanya Raju to withdraw from the contest. Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy was believed to have spoken to Chaitanya Raju in a bid to convince him to withdraw his nomination.
The high command has already succeeded in bringing pressure on Infrastructure Minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao to opt out of contest by fielding Subbarami Reddy in the Rajya Sabha polls.
Subbarami Reddy managed to win over the confidence of Ganta, using his clout with Union Minister K Chiranjeevi. Former Minister JC Diwakar Reddy who was also in the race initially had to backtrack after his "Volvo bus-to-each MLA" offer boomeranged on him.
News Posted: 29 January, 2014
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