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Nothing to lose

When threats don’t work, they will need to be carried out. For a long time now, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti has been threatening to make its Members of Parliament and State legislators resign if the demand for a separate Telangana State was not granted. With the ruling Congress showing zero interest in carving out a separate State from Andhra Pradesh, the TRS knew from the beginning that a Telangana State would have to remain in the dream realm in the foreseeable fu ture. But as Telangana statehood was its single-point agenda, there was no question of this regional party not making noises on this issue at every forum, whether it be Parliament or a local public meeting. In time, however, people wearied of the threats and ultimatums and the TRS was exposed as an ineffectual party with an unrealisable one-point programme. In August 2006, its Ministers resigned from the Central government and the party quit the United Progressive Alliance, supposedly to build political pressure on the Congress. With elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Assembly due in just over a year, the TRS must have calculated that it had nothing much to lose, and possibly something to gain, by asking its members to resign from the Lok Sabha, the Assembly, and the Legislative Council. Thus, after yet another high-pitched but futile effort to raise the issue in the Lok Sabha, the party’s MPs, MLAs, and MLCs handed over their letters of resignation to the presiding officers.

In the 2004 contests, the TRS benefited not from any popular upsurge in support of Telangana, but from an anti-incumbency wave against the Telugu Desam Party. At that time the regional party was an ally of the Congress, which rode the wave triumphantly. The TRS first pressed for a separate State as part of the government at the Centre and in Andhra Pradesh. But the Congress did not need the TRS for the survival of either the minority UPA government or the State government headed by Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, which was formed on the strength of an overwhelming majority in the Assembly. With the TDP as well as the Congress opposed to a separate Telangana, the TRS will be virtually on its own in the contests ahead. The BJP is sympathetic to its cause, but is a political rival in the region. It is likely that the TRS will whip up emotions on Telangana statehood — in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the party’s abject political failure and derive whatever mileage it can as election season approaches.

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