Congress trying to regain lost ground

HYDERABAD: With Telangana Congress leaders receiving "clear signals" from the Centre that there might be further delay in delivering a separate state, they are contemplating to come up with ways to at least retrieve their lost ground in T belt.The T Congress Steering Committee which met at the residence of Rajya Sabha member and steering committee chairman K Keshava Rao on Tuesday examined two options before them - formation of a wide-ranging forum with the sole purpose of bringing pressure on the Centre to deliver T.The forum, to be led by the Congress, would be free for other T parties to join.But the members of the Congress steering committee reportedly expressed doubts over the forum succeeding in attracting other political parties into it since a similar experiment - formation of T Joint Action Committee - did not succeed in its attempts to bring all political parties under one umbrella.The Telugu Desam and the Congress moved away from the TJAC and it is left with only the TRS and the BJP.The second option that was understood to have been examined at the steering committee was formation of a forum comprising only Congress leaders to champion the cause for T after coming out of the party."These two options were discussed at length at the meeting," one leader who attended the meeting said.Some members who attended the meeting, apart from the two chairmen, seven MPs, two former MLAs - Jupalli Krishna Rao and Komatireddy Venkata Reddy and four MLAs, took exception to the steering committee's another chairman K Jana Reddy making an appeal to the government employees to call of the strike which they said had sent wrong signals to the people that the party was deliberately watering down the movement.Though Jana Reddy reportedly defended his appeal on the grounds that it was made only to make the employees take a break and that the political leadership would take the initiative, failed to cut much ice with them.Some of the members also wanted to know as why the ministers were reluctant to resign to their cabinet berths.Jana Reddy, who was the only minister who attended the meeting, said that resignation was only one of the several devices that were available for bringing pressure on the government and that it would be used at an appropriate time.There were few takers for this line of argument and later, while speaking to media persons, Jana Reddy laboured for more than half an hour on how resignations would not help in the cause of T."If resignations will make Centre deliver T in a month's time, I am ready to put in my papers," he said in an angry response to the repeated queries from the media persons.As the hints that Keshava Rao was giving at the media briefing were nothing but the Centre making its stand clear that there would be no T at least for the time being, the line that the Congress leaders were taking appeared more in the nature of wresting the leadership of the movement from TRS and restore the party's base in T belt in time for 2014 polls.What has come as a surprise was that the steering committee did not react to TJAC call - Congress ko khatam karo, Telangana ko hasil karo.Instead, forum leaders described the call as on burst due to frustration that T was being delayed.