Hyderabad, June 26: Telugu Desam Party president N. Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday charged Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy with creating trouble in the Opposition ranks and luring legislators to bolster the ruling party’s strength.
Inaugurating a three-day workshop conducted to analyse the party’s poll debacle, Mr. Naidu said the Chief Minister was feeling insecure as his party had a wafer-thin majority and he feared a rebellion. It was to overcome this insecurity that Dr. Reddy was openly inviting leaders from other parties to join the Congress and working with the objective of weakening the TDP, as it had emerged stronger.
Obviously perturbed over the party MLA, N. Prasanna Kumar Reddy’s letters raising the leadership issue and a former legislator, T. Srinivas Yadav, demanding a change in the party’s stand over Telangana, he said he knew who was behind them obliquely referring to the Chief Minister.
“The party will not be cowed down by letters and other threats. It had faced several crises in the past and come out stronger after each one of them.”
The TDP president said Dr. Reddy was adopting a variety of devious methods to lure the Opposition MLAs. If the offer of money and posts did not work, he was misusing official machinery to book false cases to make them surrender as was done in the case of the TDP’s Dalit MLA from Kovvur, T. V. Rama Rao. A CID probe was ordered after booking cases of rape and attempt to murder against Mr. Rama Rao though the police found no victim and no evidence of wrongdoing. Would a similar case be booked against the Chief Minister just because a political rival lodges a complaint with the police, he asked, demanding withdrawal of the CID inquiry and the case against Mr. Rao.
Problems galore
At a time when the State was faced with a plethora of serious problems like construction of Babli and 11 other irrigation projects by Maharashtra, the Director-General of Police taking on Election Commission, price rise, deficient rainfall and shortage of farm inputs, the Chief Minister was only thinking of destabilising opposition parties, he added.
On racial attacks on Indians in Australia, he said the Central as well as State governments had miserably failed to protect them and demanded that an all-party parliamentary delegation be sent there.
–Agencies