Justice B N Srikrishna on Thursday cleared the confusion over why the commission headed by him suggested six options, rather than one, on the Telangana question.
Contradicting the claim by the then Union home minister P Chidambaram that the commission failed to recommend a single solution to the separate state issue, the retired Supreme Court judge said it was the Centre which wanted the commission to recommend a set of options.
Breaking his silence since he submitted his report early last year, Srikrishna told reporters in Delhi Thursday that the Telangana issue was still hanging fire because of political compulsions, implying that it had little to do with any lack of clarity in the report. He made it clear that the commission followed the modalities set for it and explored various options to solve the contentious issue.
“At the time of constituting our committee, the Centre asked us to suggest various options to solve the Telangana issue. We prepared the report as per that directive. Our report is very clear and there is no confusion at all,” said Srikrishna. The retired judge wondered whether the Centre had really gone through his committee’s report.
Justice Srikrishna’s remarks come at a time when the issue has flared up again after the Telangana March on Sunday. To build on that momentum, the Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) on Thursday called for demonstrations across the region and in the state capital on Oct. 16 during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Hyderabad to participate in the Conference of the Parties (CoP 11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“We will take up various forms of protest on the day of the PM’s visit to remind the Centre of its promise of statehood to Telangana,” TJAC chairman Prof M Kodandaram said.
However, the Telangana movement is having to contend with fissures within the coalition of parties and groups agitating for a separate state.
Indicative of the tensions within, Kodandaram called on BJP state president G Kishan Reddy and CPI state secretary K Narayana separately on Thursday while TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao invited leaders of the CPI-ML (New Democracy) to lunch at his residence.
The TJAC chairman’s inclination to draw the BJP and CPI further into the separate state struggle is not entirely in the interests of the TRS, which has monopolised the issue so far. Kodandaram said he met Kishan Reddy and Narayana to thank them for their support to the Telangana March, sources said he also sought their support for further intensification of the movement. On the other hand, the TRS boss has been silent since his return from the national capital, limiting himself to the lunch with CPI-ML (New Democracy) leaders. He is understood to have told the people round the table that the mood at the Centre is in favour of according statehood to Telangana.
Chandrasekhar Rao’s silence on the parleys he had in New Delhi encouraged his detractors, mainly Vijayawada MP Lagadapati Rajagopal, to dismiss his claim that he was invited to the national capital to discuss modalities of bifurcation of the state. “Nobody called KCR to Delhi to hold talks with the Congress leadership. In fact, it was the TRS chief who mooted a proposal to the Congress high command to divide the state by giving Union territory status to Hyderabad. Rao’s claim that he would once again visit Delhi to continue his talks is also not true. The Centre made it clear that without consensus the Telagnana issue will not be resolved,” said Rajagopal after meeting Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde in Delhi Thursday.
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