Andhra Pradesh chief minister K Rosaiah is turning philosophical. Not surprising given the turbulent time he has been having at the helm of affairs ever since he took over in the most unexpected circumstances in September last year.
“This kind of fate should not befall even an enemy,” was one such philosophical comment made by Rosaiah with some of his confidants recently. He was referring to himself in the role of chief minister, a post any other politician would love to occupy but the grand old man of AP politics appears hardly happy with the way things have worked out for him.
If informed sources are to be believed, Rosaiah is beginning to feel that his patience is being tested for far too long and it is high time the Congress central leadership stepped in to rein his own party leaders who have been relentlessly working against him. His point is that he did not clamour for the post and having chosen him to steer the government in the wake of YSR’s death, Delhi should take steps to allow him to function without trouble from within.
The first two months of Rosaiah’s tenure saw public statements by Congress leaders, including ministers, that not he but Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy should be the CM even as the government had to handle the havoc caused by one of the worst floods ever to hit the State. There was some relief when the party high command finally got him formally elected as leader of the legislature party but it proved to be short as the Telangana agitation soon engulfed the State.
In the past four months, there have not been many occasions when ministers jointly met in the Secretariat to discuss issues concerning the people. Instead, they preferred to meet outside, mostly in groups, and some of them made it a point to pay ‘obeisance’ to ‘their leader’. One of them even quit the Cabinet protesting the central leadership’s decision not to anoint the heir-apparent. Rosaiah’s internal enemies have also been regularly in touch with legislators guiding them on how to go about on each and every issue.
On another front, he has also not been receiving unstinted support from the bureaucracy. Just as an IPS officer, currently heading the AP State Road Transport Corporation, had chosen to hike fares without even keeping the chief minister informed and it was left to the government to draw flak from its own partymen, opposition and the public alike. The loyalties of the officer, S S P Yadav, who was removed as DGP after Rosaiah took over, are well known.
The last straw proved to be Thursday’s attacks on Reliance establishments across the State following a debate in some TV channels on an old report carried in a Russian tabloid suggesting a conspiracy behind the death of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy. What apparently rattled the chief minister was the information provided to him that some of his own party leaders were directly or indirectly responsible for the violence. He shared the same with a delegation that enquired from him why such a stringent action was initiated by the government and told them that he was not willing to intervene in the investigation taken up by the police.
Working for long hours each day, fighting against all odds and battling age, Rosaiah also had this to say to someone: “I am probably paying for sins committed in my previous births.”