Hyderabad: Year 2014 saw the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and the birth of Telangana, the 29th state of the Indian Union.
The Congress and its leader Sonia Gandhi, who took the decision to create a separate Telangana, were however ignored by the people of Telangana and they voted for the TRS, the party whose sole agenda was to achieve statehood.
Almost all parties at some point or another have sided for bifurcation keeping their parties’ interests in mind, but ultimately it was the political decision taken by Ms Gandhi as president of the Congress, the same party that had united the two provinces decades earlier.
However, even the Congress was accused of dodging the issue for four years since its earlier announcement on December 9, 2009.
This act of “playing politics” before the general elections was recognised by the people who showed the door to the party in both states.
Ms Gandhi, who heavily relied on inputs by the local Telangana Congress leaders that the people of Telangana would vote the party to power in gratitude for granting the separate state, was clearly misguided.
Similarly the party’s estimates on the Andhra situation, that the Congress would remain at least as a deciding factor in making the government after the general elections that followed the bifurcation again proved wrong.
The Congress achieved the dubious distinction of losing deposits in 173 out of 175 Assembly seats and in all 25 Lok Sabha segments in Andhra. The 3 per cent vote share of the Congress itself is a record.
It was not only the estimates and calculations of the Congress party that went wrong; even the prediction of TRS chief K. Chandrasekhar Rao, who had predicted that Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy’s party would win at least 100 seats in Andhra was also wrong.
Ironically, the earlier CM of combined Andhra Pradesh N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, who had opposed his own party’s decision on division of the state, had to step down from his post following the Centre’s decision to introduce the bifurcation Bill in Parliament. But, he had no one backing him and he himself was afraid of contesting from his own constituency, which he nurtured for many years.
