Merger or alliance with Congress: TRS leadership to decide today

Zee Media Bureau

Hyderabad: Top leaders of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) will meet here on Monday to take a call on whether the party should merge with Congress or forge an alliance with the latter.

According to reports, today's meeting will be attended by TRS politburo, lawmakers and state executive.

The meeting was earlier scheduled to be held on March 1, however, it was postponed for today. During today's meet, the TRS leaders will discuss the post-bifurcation scenario in Telangana region.

Ahead of the meeting, AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh had claimed that TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao had given positive indications about merger.

TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao, or KCR, had recently announced that he would be willing to merge his party with Congress if the latter accepted the separate Telangana demand.

But last week, when the Congress welcomed two of its expelled leaders - Vijayashanti and Arvind Reddy - into its fold, the TRS took very serious view of the move.

"It is certainly in bad taste with the Congress party, while talking to us about a merger or an alliance, at the same time they go about poaching our sitting MLA Arvind Reddy. This is something the Congress leadership needs to understand, that if you want to be friends with TRS, you cannot be picking up people from TRS and expect us to be friends also," KCR's son KT Rama Rao said last weeek.

With this move, political observers said the TRS may have got the exit opportunity it was looking for. TRS leaders told a private TV news channel that they were under no obligation to either merge the TRS with the Congress or have a pre-poll alliance.

"We are grateful to the Congress and that is why we went and met Mrs Sonia Gandhi. But then this would not have been possible without the BJP's support either. So, we will take a decision based on the circumstances," Harish Rao, TRS leader and nephew of KCR, was quoted as saying.

Another contentious point has been as to when and where Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh - which are due along with the Lok Sabha polls - will be held. The TRS says it wants polls to be held in the new state of Telangana and not in undivided Andhra Pradesh.

Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, who played a key role in drafting the Andhra Pradesh Bifurcation Bill which led to the creation of Telangana, though says it would take at least three months after the presidential assent for notification for actual division or what is called the appointed day.