Axing rebels, Cong weighs pros and cons

Hyderabad: A day after 16 of its MLAs defied the whip and voted to topple the Kiran Kumar Reddy government, the Congress appeared to be in no great hurry to have them disqualified.

Still fuzzy after surviving the trust vote in the Assembly in the early hours of Tuesday, the party seemed to be weighing the consequences of taking any action that would lead to a whole clutch of byelections round the state.

Sixteen Congress MLAs and one Praja Rajyam Party MLA, all owing cross-party allegiance to YSR Congress leader Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, defied their party whips to support the TDP's motion of no-confidence.

While Jagan went to town Tuesday to laud the crossvoters for 'sacrificing' their seats to back him up, signals from the Congress indicated that sack proceedings may not be triggered like night follows day.

First, the move would have to be greenlighted by the high command and then a decision taken to sack all the cross-voters together or in batches.

PCC president Botsa Satyanarayana spoke of 'appropriate action' at an 'appropriate time'. 'The action will be in accordance with the rules. Those who have to initiate proceedings will do it at an appropriate time,' he said.

Sources said the Congress high command's thinking on the matter will be clear after the party's point man for AP, Ghulam Nabi Azad, returns from abroad on Wednesday.

Chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy -- who hosted a celebratory tea party for his party's MLAs and ministers on Tuesday -- is reported to have said that the whip violators would have to go. Other senior leaders, notably V Hanumantha Rao, too advocated tough action.

Their thinking is that if no action is taken now, it would only embolden fence sitters in the party who nurse a fond heart for Jagan Mohan Reddy.

Sources said what's worrying the Congress leaders is the prospect of facing bypolls to the cross-voters' seats plus seven others that are already vacant. These are scattered all over the state, and would be seen as a referendum on Congress rule.

As a majority of these seats are represented by Congress MLAs, failure in a good number of them would give crowing rights to Jagan Mohan Reddy and/or Chandrababu Naidu.

In all these constituencies, three-cornered contests are probable and the result could be anybody's guess. Six of the seats fall in Telangana where the prospects of the Congress are not bright because of the separate state sentiment.

While Jagan, in his press conference in Hyderabad on Tuesday, dared the Congress to disqualify these MLAs and fastrack the byelections, sources in the Congress said the party is likely to use dilatory tactics to see that the bypolls do not all come together.

It is likely to wait for the bypoll process for seven vacant seats to get under way first before filing disqualification papers before the speaker.

As regards the one crossvoter PRP MLA, Sobha Nagireddy, there was no clarity whether or not the whip issued by her party was valid.

She maintains that it isn't because when the party merged in the Congress, she gave a letter to the Election Commission opposing the merger and requesting that she be treated as an Independent.