It is a recorded fact that Bharat Rashtra Samithi president and former Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao had joined hands with Telugu Desam Party president and present Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu in the 2009 assembly elections.
Those who were aware of the state politics those days know the reason. KCR was hell bent on preventing the Congress party from returning to power in the then combined Andhra Pradesh under the leadership of then chief minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy, who was strongly resisting the Telangana formation.
By then, the BRS – then Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) – was losing its hold in the region and man of its leaders, including KCR’s own nephew T Harish Rao was secretly said to be hand in glove with YSR.
So, KCR had no option but to join hands with TDP headed by Naidu, who was then adopting a two-eyed policy on Telangana and Andhra and had even given a letter to the then Pranab Mukherjee committee in favour of Telangana.
KCR had joined hands with even the CPI, which was then against bifurcation only to prevent YSR from returning to power.
But soon after the elections, KCR had even gone to Punjab to take part in the NDA rally to appease the BJP. That was the height of political opportunism.
But on Monday, while recalling the journey of his party in the last 25 years, KCR strongly defended joining hands with Chandrababu Naidu in 2009.
He explained that the tie-up between the then TRS and the TDP was only to force Naidu to support the Telangana cause.
“Naidu was against Telangana formation. But I wanted to make him say Jai Telangana and that is the only reason why I entered into an alliance with the TDP,” KCR said.
KCR also alleged that Sonia Gandhi had asked him on as many as 16 occasions to compromise on Hyderabad in order to expedite the creation of Telangana.
“She told me conceding Hyderabad would lead to a quicker resolution of statehood, but I firmly refused to yield to either persuasion or pressure,” he said.
He reiterated that the movement’s core demand was a separate Telangana state with Hyderabad as its capital, and that the leadership fought resolutely to achieve that goal.
