Hyderabad: BRS president and former chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao on Friday launched a no-holds barred attack on the Congress government and issued a warning that his party would not hesitate to turn the state into a battlefield if such a situation was warranted.
Rao, who addressed a press conference that lasted nearly a year at Sircilla, was vituperative in his comments and did not shy away from using phrases bordering on expletives when referring to the Congress government and its leaders. He completely ignored the raging controversy over the tapping of phones during his regime, as well as corruption charges related to the Kaleshwaram project.
Referring to what he described as failures of the Congress government with respect to irrigation, supply of drinking water, the plight of farmers, keeping its promises to the people, and leaving weavers to their fate, Rao said if the government did not act on these and other issues, “we will chase you.”
He added: “We will play football with you.” The current spell of drought-like conditions, he said, were a Congress government created and it was not a natural calamity.
On the Kaleshwaram project, whose key barrages have been damaged, he said the the Congress government had no understanding of how the system worked. Making it clear that if the government did not know how to go about it, the BRS will do so with him in the lead, he said. “I will lead 50,000 people to Medigadda and run the pumps of the Kaleshwaram project,” he declared.
He added a rider that he would do so once the flows at the barrage, built after the confluence of Godavari and Pranhita rivers, touch 20,000 cusecs.
The current inflows at Medigadda are around 1,500 cusecs, mostly from the Pranahita, and the heavy inflows are expected only after the monsoon sets in and brings rain, usually in June.
“There was some shifting of sand under two pillars (at Medigadda), this happens at all barrages. Recently a bridge on the Ganga collapsed. These are common, due to some small engineering or maintenance lapses,” he said, adding that what happened at Medigadda was being blown out of proportion.
He alleged that engineers who he spoke with told him that the government stopped them from lifting water and forced them to release some 50 tmc ft (thousand million cubic feet of water) from the Kaleshwaram barrages into the sea. “They (Congress government) did this to blame KCR and the BRS government,” Rao claimed.
Castigating the Congress government as one led by nincompoops, Rao called on people to take the Congress’ claim that the Lok Sabha elections are a referendum on its rule seriously and vote accordingly. Every section of society has been cheated by the Congress government, and it must be taught a lesson, he said. The people will do so.
During his tour on Friday, and his recent visit to Nalgonda, Suryapet and Jangaon districts, the BRS chief said he met many farmers facing severe distress. “Crops in around 15 lakh acres in nearly every district have dried up,” he said.
