Monday Mirchi : Phone tapping case a fight among officials as netas step back

The high-profile Telangana phone-tapping case, which at one point saw netas spit venom on one another with explosive charges, seems to have been relegated to a fight within babudom now, with ex-officials and current ones battling it out as scapegoats while political leaders have stepped back in a puzzling anticlimax. The latest statements of Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy and ex-CM K Chandrasekhar Reddy about it have taken official circles by surprise. Revanth Reddy has called it an issue concerning officials as (arrested DSP) Praneeth Rao and others had destroyed vital pieces of evidence, following which a complaint was raised by the officials concerned. Thus, the issue of phone tapping came out, and so the CM expects officials to give him further information after due enquiries. KCR, on his part, has said that what happened concerned the Home Department and that, as then CM, he had nothing to do.  Likewise, on the Kaleshwaram project officials are being made bakras, with ex-CM KCR going on record that he could only ‘suggest’ (designing, design changes or whatever) and not go beyond officials. Having moved heaven and earth on the ‘graft’ involved in the construction of Kaleshwaram project, Revanth is now saying that officials must decide on repairing the reported damage and restoring the project. All told, a bureaucrat commented that political parties are making bureaucrats scapegoats in the face of elections.