HYDERABAD: In a counter offensive aimed at putting pressure on the Congress regime in AP, 25 ruling party MLAs and two MPs owing cross-party allegiance to Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy announced on Sunday their decision to resign from the Assembly and the party. Two legislators of the TDP and one belonging to Praja Rajyam, also Jagan campers, made a similar decision.They said they would meet Speaker Nadendla Manohar at 11 am on Monday to put in their papers. Should he reject their quit letters as he has the resignations of 100 Telangana MLAs, they said they will resort to a hunger strike.However, it was not clear if the resignation papers will be delivered in the required format; if they are not, their acceptance is doubtful. The two MPs -- Sabbam Hari (Ankapalli) and Mekapati Rajamohan Reddy (Nellore) -- have not made it clear when they will submit their resignations. The Jagan loyalists in the Congress said they were taking this step to because they are hurt by the CBI’s naming of former chief minister late Y S Rajasekhara Reddy in the FIR filed against his son. “This is a slur on someone who brought the party to power twice. We cannot digest this,” former minister Pilli Subash Chandra Bose, who spoke for the others, told newsmen.Sources, however, suggested that this is a ploy by the YSR Congress Party to camouflage its inability to rouse popular support for Jagan in the face of CBI’s raids on his and his investors’ premises. By remaining silent, the party would be seen as helpless, belying its claim of enjoying popular support.These mass resignations come to the table of speaker Manohar in the wake of those submitted by Telangana legislators last month. He rejected them as acts of emotion. Sources said the Jagan loyalists are gambling on the speaker using a similar yardstick this time too.This threat of resignation, even if carried to its logical conclusion, is unlikely to destabilise the Kiran Kumar Reddy government unless more legislators join the Jagan camp.According to sources, the Jagan Mohan Reddy camp is making efforts to lure at least a dozen more legislators so as to be able to put pressure on Raj Bhavan to ask Kiran Kumar Reddy to prove his majority in the House. In such an eventuality, the chances of the TDP abstaining from the vote and thereby saving the government is not ruled out.
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