Telangana

KTR slams Centre, accuses it of ignoring Telangana for political reasons

There is no way to ascertain if KT Rama Rao’s ire was directed at the Centre because his father and Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao could not get to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi while he was in Delhi. But the Telangana Industry minister was frustrated that the Centre was “purposefully ignoring” the state due to alleged political reasons. KTR said this was “hampering” Telangana’s growth. And the minister speaking his mind, revealed hard facts.

A specific reference was made to the defence industrial production corridor. KTR said Telangana had pitched for it because the corridor between Hyderabad and Bengaluru because of other defence-related units being located here, is ideally suited. Instead, it was decided to set it up in Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh and Chennai.

“Unfortunately, it appears to me, in matters of national importance and even in matters of strategic sectors like defence and aerospace, sometimes regional compulsions outweigh nationally important locations,” said KTR.

An investor, KTR said, told him that his company had been told to set up his defence unit in either Nagpur, Gujarat or Rajasthan and not in Hyderabad or Bengaluru.

While on the face of it, KTR was speaking hard facts that would certainly embarrass the Centre but the angst also reflects an inability on Hyderabad’s part to get its work done with New Delhi due to political reasons. The BJP sees Telangana as a low-hanging fruit and has ambitions to grow at Congress and TRS expense. From the time that KCR’s daughter Kavitha was defeated by the BJP candidate, who incidentally is the son of a TRS rebel MP, all has not been well between the leadership of the two parties. 

The appointment of a former BJP state president as the Governor replacing ESL Narasimhan with who KCR got along famously, also has introduced an element of frost in relations between Raj Bhavan and Pragathi Bhavan. 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.