Naik and MSR: Two ‘sidekicks’ Congress may never forget…!

Former Union Minister and senior Congress party leader in Telangana Balaram Naik is hogging the headlines for all wrong reasons. His comments on Friday that Warangal would be merged with AP if the electorate failed to vote for Congress in the coming by-election, has stirred up enough turmoil within the grand-old party. Despite their stoic silence in public, partymen at various levels are privately admitting that Naik’s ‘drops of poison in a milk pot’ are certain to dent Congress party’s aggressive efforts to project the TRS government as anti-farmer and gain mileage out of it.

Interestingly, not many within the party are surprised at Naik nose-diving himself into sensitive issues with his flippant remarks. In fact, those watching the backward community leader’s progression over the years know him as a loose cannon, who courts trouble unwittingly, and sadly, at the most avoidable times.

It can’t be a coincidence, but Naik’s previous best show of ‘faux pas’ before Friday’s barbs, also came centering around the Telangana issue. At the height of the intense Telangana agitation three years ago, Naik – as a Union minister of state then – provided striking glimpses of his uninhibited public-speaking skills and irrational logic.

As a staunch votary of statehood for Telangana, Naik went overboard in persuading his constituency and came up with an astonishing prediction. He said that Telangana would be reunited with Andhra Pradesh within 20 years if the separate state experiment failed. His claim sure had a few sit up initially. But there was hardly any public outcry as most political parties chose to brush it aside as “hollow rhetoric”.

Leaders like Naik are not uncommon across our political spectrum. But very few match (or even exceed) his caliber in stirring the hornet’s nest with sweeping statements. Veteran Congress leader M S Satyanarayana Rao takes the coveted position among these masters who court controversies and land their parties deeper in trouble.

For years, MSR remained the toast of the media, all thanks to his countless gaffes that have assumed legendary status. In fact, beaming with pride in a separate Telangana state today, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhara Rao and his TRS would be deeply indebted to this very senior Congress leader. Perhaps, they won’t even mind going on record about the role MSR played unwittingly in rejuvenating the TRS-led statehood movement during its early days.

It was MSR’s mindless gauntlet in the past to KCR that provoked the TRS chief to quit his Karimnagar Lok Sabha seat which he won with a wafer-thin margin. But in a dramatic turnaround, KCR wrested the seat again but with a handsome margin in a resounding victory. As history shows, this emerged as one of the watershed moments in the Telangana struggle, where KCR’s huge vote margin became a potent weapon to reflect the true Telangana aspirations and make a strong case in Delhi’s corridors of power for a separate state.

Being the reason for such a humongous political upheaval, MSR had no option but to lick his wounds on his frail body in a forced political renunciation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWfqyoLGANM

Durga Prasad Kanamaluru