Kishore Poreddy Column :No takers for KCR’s national dream!

Of the 20 big States in India, Telangana, governed by BRS supremo K.Chandrasekhar Rao, stands at 18th position in the ‘governance’ category with a 65.2 score out of 120 points in India Today’s ‘State of the States Survey 2022’.

Punjab, ruled by the AAP’s Bhagwant Mann, secured 20th place with a score of 49.1. Both the ‘nonperforming’ Chief Ministers met in Hyderabad this week, much to the joy of the BRS.

Even as prominent national leaders are shying away from meeting KCR, the BRS tried to project Mann’s meeting with its leader as a significant political development. KCR’s office claimed that the two CMs discussed ‘national politics’, but the AAP clarified that it was a ‘courtesy’ visit. There was ‘nothing political’ about it.The meeting between the duo occurred in the backdrop of KCR’s daughter and MLC Kavitha’s name appearing in court filings of the Enforcement Directorate in the Delhi liquor policy scam.

From the day KCR announced the renaming of TRS to BRS by shedding ‘Telangana’ from the party’s name, the party’s spin doctors had only one job. They were in a frantic search for leaders from other States willing to meet him. However, top leaders from other states have avoided KCR as they are aware of his style of politics.

ince significant political leaders were unwilling to meet KCR, no worries, BRS will create its own ‘leaders’ of national ‘significance’. For example, Rakesh Tikait of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, who had met KCR previously, has not shown interest in meeting him this time.

So, KCR met a few people from out-of-state and claimed they were farmers’ leaders from across the country who had come to plead with him to lead them. Similarly, a group of people, purportedly from Andhra Pradesh, met KCR Thursday.

The BRS’s mouthpiece claimed they had come to extol him as ‘the ray of hope for Andhra too’. This lack of interest among leaders nationally proves there are no takers for BRS’s ‘Telangana Model of Development’ outside Telangana!  

Barring two leaders known nationally, no other leader worth their salt attended the inauguration of the BRS office in New Delhi. The BRS leadership’s ‘hope’ that a good number of leaders would make a beeline to meet KCR did not materialise, forcing KCR to cut short his visit.  The humiliation meted out by KCR at a press conference in Patna in September was the last straw for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

At the presser, the leaders kept asking each other to ‘baithiye’ and ‘chaliye’ respectively amid amused media persons.  Despite Kumaraswamy’s statement that there would not be a pre-poll alliance between the JDS and the BRS, the pink media went into overdrive, cooking up stories about a possible coalition. It claimed JDS and BRS would ally to fight in the border districts such as Bidar, Yadgir, Raichur, Koppal, Kalaburagi and Ballari-Vijayapura to clinch around 40 Assembly seats. However, the former PM and father of Kumaraswamy, HD Deve Gowda, is fully aware of KCR’s tricks.

The last time the two leaders met, the BRS leaders claimed KCR had discussed important political issues with the former PM. The JDS patriarch had to take pains to clarify that nothing of the kind transpired.

The book Aparichitudu, published by Dileep Kumar, KCR’s former private secretary, illustrates KCR’s disastrous stint as a Union Minister during the Manmohan Singh government. The then PM had to tender an apology in Parliament for the irresponsible attitude of his cabinet colleague.

Forget national vision; KCR proved to be a leader without patriotic fervour. He skipped the all-party meeting convened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to strengthen teamwork to drive India’s G20 presidency to its full potential. Leaders from major opposition parties like Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Chief Ministers Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, MK Stalin and Naveen Patnaik, etc., attended the meeting, putting the nation over party politics. KCR has skipped such events before. The 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Indian School of Business, one of the top business schools in Asia, in May this year was another example.

Those who follow politics closely, mainly KCR, conclude that KCR’s only aim is to retain power in Telangana for a third term. Renaming TRS to BRS is part of his strategy to divert the political discourse from his disastrous performance in the state and move the discussion to blaming the Center and raising Telangana sentiment again.

As a result, sensing the subterfuge, national leaders from other political parties are keeping a distance from him. They do not want to be ridiculed later for taking his ‘national efforts’ seriously.

The catastrophic impact of KCR’s misgovernance in his two stints as the CM has been discussed and debated in this column. Given that record, BRS or TRS, KCR will soon have to sit in the Opposition.

(The author is BJP TS spokesperson)