Hyderabad, July 23: All Telangana Congress leaders were previously invited by Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad at his residence where he reiterated his earlier stand that unless a group of 10 leaders was formed, he could not initiate a formal dialogue on the Telangana issue. He later postponed the meeting to Monday evening.
The Telangana leaders, meanwhile, are getting restless in New Delhi and many of them now think that the Central Congress leadership will not take a firm stand on Telangana and will only do so after a consensus is reached among leaders from all three regions. The legislators also realised that their resignations, submitted on July 4, were not going to be accepted in the near future. The AP Assembly Speaker, Mr N. Manohar, has left on a foreign tour and is likely to return only in the second week of August. As he had announced earlier, Mr Manohar will speak to all members who had resigned besides consult constitutional experts and senior legal luminaries before taking a decision on accepting the resignations. No one is sure how long that will take.
“We have been staying away from our ministerial responsibilities since July 4. Our situation is worse than the MPs and MLAs and we don’t know whether to attend our duties or not,” said a senior minister.
The Nalgonda MP, Mr Gutta Sukhender Reddy, meanwhile. said that unless the talks were centred on Telangana statehood, they would not withdraw their resignations.