The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : TD, TRS efforts come a cropper

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Wednesday, Jul 23, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

TD, TRS efforts come a cropper

Special Correspondent

Left expresses willingness to join hands with Chiranjeevi’s party

Celebration time: Congress activists celebrating the UPA Government’s victory in trust vote, at Gandhi Bhavan in Hyderabad on Tuesday.

HYDERABAD: The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) will now have to re-work their political strategies as the vigorous efforts they had put in to defeat the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government came to a naught on Tuesday. The ruling alliance finally sailed through with a comfortable majority of 19 votes in Parliament.

Both these parties threw in everything at their command to strengthen the Left parties and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the hope that the government would fall and usher a major shift in national politics in which they would play a role.

Their hectic confabulations with national parties even triggered talk of a grand anti-Congress alliance in the State between the TDP, TRS, the Left and the BSP, though none of their leaders spoke of such a front.

To some extent, such a forecast was not without basis considering that TDP president N. Chandrababu Naidu as well as TRS chief K. Chandrasekhar Rao had projected Ms. Mayawati as the Prime Ministerial candidate if the UPA government fell.

The TRS banked on Ms. Mayawati’s support for separate Telangana whereas Mr. Naidu had sought a bigger political say in national politics, hoping for an encore of the role of ‘kingmaker’ that he assayed in the mid-nineties.

However, irrespective of the drubbing that the Opposition received in Parliament, the opposition parties had indeed moved closer, though the Left parties were not willing to say anything about their future alliances. Even the TDP would be unwilling to take any call at this stage about any tie-up with the TRS in view of the likely adverse impact in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema.

Besides, it would have to tread cautiously on forging an alliance with the Left, as they had expressed willingness to join hands with the party being launched by film star Chiranjeevi sometime next month.

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Andhra Pradesh