T leaders of Congress threaten to quit again

July 1: The Telangana issue took centre stage again on Friday with ruling Congress MPs, state legislators and ministers from the Telangana region announcing they will resign en masse on July 4 in support of their demand for a separate state of Telangana.

Also on Friday, a day after retiring as the Union home secretary, Mr G.K. Pillai, speaking exclusively to this newspaper, revealed that “a decision on the Telangana issue will be taken this month”. He revealed that the home ministry “will shortly be calling an eight-party meet on Telangana to settle the issue”. He said a lot of political consultations “have already taken place”.

Reacting sharply to the Telangana Congress leaders’ resignation announcement, the AICC general secretary and in-charge of AP party affairs, Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad, said, “Telangana statehood cannot be granted in a day and needs consensus at both national and state level among all the three regions”. Mr Azad who was in Hyderabad, told newsmen that the Telangana Congress leaders should wait for the central party leadership to take a decision on the issue before rushing in with resignations.

The resignations have also been timed with the start of the academic year for colleges. Classes in Osmania University and JNTU are scheduled to begin on July 4. Sources said the Telangana leaders did not want to face the ire of students of Telangana region at the start of the academic year and rushed with the decision to resign. The students had earlier targeted leaders who did not support the separate state movement and had even roughed up several of them. This is for the second time that the Telangana Congress leaders have offered to resign. Earlier in December 2010, the Congress MPs, MLAs and ministers had threatened to resign en masse if the the Centre did not concede to their demands of a separate state and if the state government did not lift cases registered against the agitators.