Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu served a strongly-worded ultimatum to ally Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by asking them to expect a “harsh decision” from his party if justice is not meted out to his state soon.
Naidu reiterated his disappointment over the Centre not fulfilling its promises towards Andhra Pradesh by saying that he is “ready for any sacrifices for seeking justice for Telugu people,” even if that means severing ties from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and parting ways with BJP.
“We went with the BJP for seeking justice for the people of Andhra Pradesh. I visited Delhi 29 times and met everybody several times in the last three and a half years. Justice has still not been done. Even in the last budget they did injustice to Andhra Pradesh,” said Naidu at a public event, while referring to lack of monetary provisions for the state under finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget earlier this month.
The TDP chief said bifurcation of the erstwhile unified Andhra Pradesh had not been done on scientific basis, and had ended up hurting the current state of Andhra Pradesh more than Telangana, which is why his state requires more financial support. He said that these promises were made to his state under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganization Act and then later repeated by Modi government’s minsters in the Parliament.
BJP, on the other hand, rebutted these claims through party spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao, who said that there has been a lot of “deliberate distortion of facts” over this issue in recent times. He released a list of initiatives undertaken by the Modi government to fulfil promises made to Andhra Pradesh, claiming that the Centre has gone out of its way to help out the state in a very short period of time.