HYDERABAD: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday subjected the huge number of people who had turned up for his address at LB Stadium here to a “then and now” exercise to establish how he had transformed India for the better and stressed on how Telangana, “which was born with myriad opportunities, has achieved so little in five years”.
Branding all parties in the fray -- Congress, TRS, TDP, and AIMIM -- as dynastic, family-governed and a threat to democracy, Modi, in his 43-minute-long speech in Hindi launched a scathing attack on caretaker Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao. “KCR is stealing your rights to keep the chief minister’s chair,” he claimed and added, “Of the five parties contesting the polls, only the BJP is being run democratically.”
“From where did KCR start his political journey? Wasn’t it in the Youth Congress? He got his apprenticeship from the Congress and later the TDP. How can he be any better than his masters? The TRS and the Congress have a backdoor agreement to cut Modi’s vote share,” he alleged and called Rao’s proposal for 12 per cent quota to Muslims anti-constitutional.
“Why was a separate Telangana created? Why did the people of the region wage a battle for the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh? Wasn’t it for the bright future of Telangana? The State does not belong to any party,” Modi said. The Prime Minister called the TRS the B Team of the Congress and recalled that during the recent Karnataka polls, the Congress had termed the JDS the B Team of the BJP, but eventually the two parties formed a coalition.
He called Telangana a State of great potential and said: “But certain people and their inefficient leadership have crushed the aspirations of the people. Five years have been wasted, don’t allow the future to be wasted. We will transform Telangana.”
Going all guns blazing against TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu on Monday vowed to defeat them claiming that there was a ‘sea of change’ against them across the nation.
"KCR has never criticised Modi directly in any speech. He is functioning under the remote control of Modi only with a fear that if he opposed Modi, his corrupt practices would get exposed,” the Congress president alleged.
Speaking at Rahmathnagar in Hyderabad, the Congress president said ‘‘though Modi took several anti-people initiatives like demonetization, ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ which broke the back of poor and derailed the economy, Rao supported BJP on all occasions. Modi is trying to divide the country but both TRS and MIM are supporting him. The TRS government had promised to make the new state “Bangaru Telangana” but it had only made KCR’s family a ‘Bangaru Kutumbam’, Rahul claimed. He urged the people not to be fooled by Modi and Rao.