Even as the top leaders of Telugu Desam Party and the BJP were busy in the last ditch efforts to reach a seat-sharing agreement on Saturday, a fresh trouble erupted within the Telangana unit of the BJP and at least eight district unit presidents have threatened to resign in protest against alliance.
State BJP president G Kishan Reddy told the reporters that he will talk to the unhappy districts chiefs and persuade them against taking any hasty step. “We are also in touch with the national leaders.The growing unrest within the party against the diktat of the Central leadership came to the fore as the presidents of 10 district units wrote a letter to party general secretary Prakash Javdekar strongly opposing the alliance with the TDP.
The alliance will be harmful for the party and it will weaken it in a region where party had a bright prospects in the coming elections, they warned in the letter.The letter was written after a meeting of the districts presidents where they come out heavily against the alliance.Districts presidents from Telangana were of the view that they were not interested in the affairs of Seemandhra unit of the BJP and the Central leaders interest to win some more seats there. “As far as our region is concerned, we are strongly opposed to any alliance”, one of the leaders present in the meeting said.
District party leaders were opposing the alliance with the TDP on two grounds. First they say ambiguous stand of Chandrababu Naidu during the struggle for Telangana State had made him and his party unpopular in the region. “If we associate ourselves with the TDP now, it will not go down well with the people and we will have to pay the price”, a leader from Karimnagar said. They are afraid that if the party goes with the TDP it will also lose the credibility in the eyes of the people.
The second reason they cite was that seat-sharing agreement with the TDP will deprive the party leaders their due share of tickets. “If we contest only 40 to 50 seats, what about those sincere party leaders and workers who toiled all these years and made sacrifices. It will cause huge resentment,” said another leader.
State BJP president G Kishan Redy said that he was expecting the deal to be sealed by this evening. While personally non committal on the issue of alliance, Kishan Reddy said that the party central leadership wanted an alliance with the TDP.
“Party’s central leadership has decided that the TDP should be part of the alliance to make Narendra Modi the Prime Minister”.He denied that the party had issued any direction to the party candidates to file nomination papers in any constituency in Telangana. “Talks between the two parties were still on”, he said.
The resentment also spilled out on the street with hundreds of party workers staging a demonstration outside BJP office in Hyderabad. They were also holding placards with the slogans of “No alliance with TDP” and “TDP is weak”.First sign of trouble came from Ranga Reddy district where the party unit passed a resolution demanding half of the assembly seats in the district. “If the TDP does not give the seats we want, then the BJP shold contest all the seats,” the resolution said.
Similar stand was taken by the Mahubnagar districts where the local leaders decided to file the nominations in all the constituencies without waiting for the finalisation of alliance.G Kishan Reddy’s refusal to contest the elections this time was also being seen as a mark of protest against central leadership’s decision to have the alliance. Initially Kishan Reddy was keen to contest from Secunderabad lok Sabha constituency but later he decided to focus on “strengthening the party” instead of contesting the elections.
However the party workers sitting on dharna outside the party office urged him to contest again from the Amberpet assembly constituency in Hyderabad.Trouble in the erupted on a day when Prakash Javdekar and other party leaders arrived for a final round of talks with the Telugu Desam President N Chandrababu Naidu. BJP leaders Naresh Gujral and Piyush Goyal were also taking part in the talks to persuade the TDP leaders to part with the seats demanded by the BJP.
Sources familiar with the discussions said that the TDP was willing to leave 40 assembly and 8 lok Sabha seats in Telangana and fifteen assembly and three lok Sabha seats in Seemandhra. The BJP was demanding at least 50 assembly seats in Telangana and 5 lok Sabha seats in Seemandhra. The talks were stuck on the two prestigious lok Sabha seats of Vijayawada and Visakhapatanam in Andhra.
TDP President N Chandrababu Naidu was also so frustrated with the dragging of feet by the BJP that he had decided to announce the list of candidates last evening. He had convened a press conference at 8 pm but it was cancelled after the central leadership intervened and sought the time of one more day to finalise the deal.
\\TDP on the other hand was also buoyed by the opinion poll projections showing it ahead of other parties specially in Seemandhra. CNN IBN poll has showed it winning 13 to 19 of the 42 lok Sabha seats in the state.