Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao on Friday sought to rally together key non-Congress Opposition parties against the Narendra Modi government ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament in which his Telangana Rashtra Samithi is likely to make its presence felt.
He called up Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. KCR, as he is commonly referred to, also spoke to RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and NCP patriarch Sharad Pawar.
KCR also tried to reach out to his Tamil Nadu counterpart M.K. Stalin but as the latter is in hospital with Covid, could only speak to his associates.
Some of these parties, such as the NCP and the DMK, have working relations with the Congress but the primary focus of KCR, for now, is to bring together parties with reservations about the Congress’s ability to lead the Opposition.
KCR’s move comes in the midst of a high-on-optics campaign being undertaken by the TRS against the Modi government in Telangana. The campaign caught the national eye earlier this month when the BJP’s top leadership moved to Telangana’s capital, Hyderabad, for the party’s national executive.
The TRS came out all guns blazing, mocking the BJP in general and Modi in particular. It unleashed a poster war in the capital city to compete with the BJP. The campaign had a footprint both online and offline.
KCR made a political point by not being present at the airport to greet the Prime Minister. When the BJP sought to make an issue of it, the TRS was ready with the protocol book to show that no chief minister is obligated to welcome the Prime Minister in person if the Premier is travelling on a political visit.
KCR has called a meeting of TRS MPs on Saturday to strategise for the Parliament session. In the budget session itself, the TRS members had been in protest mode over paddy procurement from Telangana.
The tone and tenor of the party — which had till recently mostly bailed out the BJP in Parliament, especially in the Rajya Sabha where it was short of numbers — have changed since KCR decided in April to join the leadership race in the Opposition camp and take on “bulldozer governance”.
Rubaiya Sayeed in court
Jammu: Rubaiya Sayeed, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s daughter, appeared before a special CBI court on Friday and identified JKLF chief Yasin Malik and three others as her abductors in 1989, officials said.
This is the first time Rubaiya has been asked to appear in the case. She had been freed after five terrorists were released in exchange.
Rubaiya, who now lives in Tamil Nadu, is listed as a prosecution witness by the CBI. Malik, chief of the banned JKLF who was recently sentenced to life imprisonment in a terror-funding case, is an accused in the abduction case.
PTI
