Bringing YSR down from pedestal - TeluguPeople.com News

HYDERABAD: There is a growing concern among the party members of the Congress in the wake of multiple raids by the CBI on the companies owned by the late Chief Minister YSR Reddy's son Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy and his associates.

Faced with the vacuum in leadership after YSR's death and an aggressive Jagan Mohan Reddy chipping away the Congress base by cashing in on sympathy for his father, the Congress appears to have taken the decision to deal with it by telling the world that YSR wasn't actually a great leader. But in doing this, the party appears to be walking into the trap laid by Jagan Mohan Reddy.

The smear campaign against late YSR could lead to two distinct possibilities. First, Jagan would stand to gain from the sympathy among people as the son of a great leader who has been wronged.

The second possibility is that if the campaign of calumny against YSR sticks, the TDP might gain. The difference of margin of victory between the Congress and the TDP in 2009 was just 1.4 per cent of votes.

Either way, the Congress is unlikely to gain in the entire exercise. A former minister in YSR cabinet T Jeevan Reddy has demanded an explanation from the Congress why it was sullying the image of late YSR and in the process damaging the image of the party.

This is in contrast to the scene in 1994 when backroom boy N Chandrababu Naidu dethroned his father-in-law NTR immediately after he won the Assembly elections with a massive mandate of 225 of the 294 seats.

After he was appointed as the chief minister of the state, Naidu did make serious efforts to not only emerge as tall leader but also get acceptance from people. He never wasted time and went round the state to learn problems of people first hand.

He came up with new and innovative schemes like Prajala Vaddaku Palana and Janmabhoomi and thus managed to erase the image of NTR from the minds of the people. He has redrawn the contours of Hyderabad by giving a push to information technology sector.

But what happened in the Congress post-YSR is different. An aging K Rosaiah was brought in as the chief minister and though he was at the helm for 14 months, he could not emerge as an alternative leader to YSR. He could not visit districts and villages and instead confined himself to the secretariat.

There was not much difference even after Kiran Kumar Reddy was brought in as Rosaiah's successor. No new schemes were announced to make people forget what YSR had done for them.

Thanks to the Telangana agitation, legislators stopped visiting their constituencies and their other colleagues too followed suit, caught between Congress-Jagan conundrums.

In a sense, the Congress leaders are trying to cover up lack of basic governance by painting YSR as a looter even while professing to continue all the welfare programmes taken up by him.

One view that is emerging is that YSR's image today is much more than what it was in 2009 when the late leader managed to win the electoral battle with a bare minimum majority required to form the government.

Jagan Mohan Reddy continues the heat by attacking the Congress for sullying the image of his late father. He said that enjoying the fruits of the late YSR's labour, the Congress government has no other work but to tarnish his image.

In this exercise, it has not hesitated to join hands with Chandrababu Naidu.