The Congress party has set the ball rolling for the year-end Assembly election in Telangana.
All India Congress Committee (AICC) president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday, 26 August, released the party’s Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) Declaration which, among other things, promises to increase reservations for SCs to 18 percent and the implementation of the A,B,C,D categorisation of subcastes among the SCs immediately after the Congress comes to power in Telangana.
Kharge released the declaration at a huge public meeting organised at Chevella near Hyderabad.
The highlights of the SC/ST Declaration are:
₹12 lakh for each Girijan and Dalit family under the Dr Ambedkar Abhaya Hastam (to rival BRS government’s Dalit Bandhu)
The Indiramma Pucca House scheme for a site and ₹6 lakh for construction (to rival BRS government’s Gruhalakshmi).
And creation of three new corporations for the benefit of SCs and STs.
The Congress is sentimental about the small town as it was from there that the late former chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh, YS Rajasekhara Reddy, began his historic padayatra in 2003 and brought the party to power a year later, breaking the stranglehold of the TDP on the state.
On 2 July, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi set the tone for the campaign for the elections by addressing a huge public meeting in Khammam to mark the induction of former BRS MP Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy into the party.
At the event, he had announced that the Congress, when it comes to power in the state, would pay ₹4,000 per month as pension to senior citizens — an announcement that flustered the ruling the BRS, which pays ₹1,000 less as pension to the aged under Aasara.
Rahul Gandhi released a farmers’ declaration in Warangal in May last year, and Priyanka Gandhi, the youth declaration in Hyderabad in May this year.
Kharge, in his address, hauled both the BRS and the BJP over the coals for entering into an tacit understanding to help each other.
“This is the reason why neither attacks the other,” he said.
At the national level, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) has distanced himself from INDIA, the newly-formed alliance of 26 parties, which only shows that his actions are intended to help the BJP, Kharge charged.
“KCR says his party is secular, but his actions help the BJP,” he said, asserting that INDIA will not only dislodge the Union government led by the BJP, but also the BRS in the state.
The Congress president, in a fiery speech, pointed out that KCR had stolen the thunder over the creation of a separate Telangana state from the Congress.
The AICC president said that it was the Congress which gave the people a separate Telangana state.
“KCR did not have the power to get Telangana.It was the Congress which empowered him.He, in turn, should have supported the Congress.But he did not.After the creation of Telangana, KCR and his family called on Sonia Gandhi and thanked her,” he said.
Kharge said he was certain that the Congress would come to power in Telangana and it would honour all the promises made to the people.“In Karnataka, we are implementing all the promises we made,” he said.
