TELANGANA : The state of the Congress in Telangana offers a glimmer of understanding of the reasons behind the party’s downward spiral nationally. The party presided over the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and creation of Telangana but managed to reap virtually no electoral dividend from the move in Telangana while being wiped out in Andhra.
Unlike in other states, the decline of the party has not been gradual. It was so precipitous in fact that analysts give specific dates to it. One was Sepatember 2, 2009, the day Y S Rajasekhara Reddy died in a helicopter crash. The second was December 9, 2009, when then home minister P Chidambaram surprised even Telangana separatists by announcing that steps would be taken to carve out Telangana.
The third was July 30, 2013, when the Congress Working Committee assented, after four years of seeming to have second thoughts, to the creation of Telangana. It went down as a Congress perfidy in coastal Andhra, and was seen as a victory for K Chandrasekhar Rao, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader who fronted the agitation.
The party has also been losing turf to new parties in its bastions. The Congress is a listing ship in Telangana, its role in the creation of the new State taken as a given, with no leadership to mount a challenge to the new ruling party, the TRS.