Avoiding taking a stand on Telangana and attempting to fix the Congress, Telugu Desam president N. Chandrababu Naidu on Wednesday asked the Centre to convene an all-party meeting to end the deadlock on giving statehood for the region. Contrary to expectations that the TD would finally take a stand on Telangana, Mr Naidu, in his letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh late on Wednesday night, put the ball in the Centre’s court and asked it to resolve the issue at the earliest.
Mr Naidu’s letter — which comes ahead of the September 30 T-march and his own padayatra starting on October 2 — may not cut much ice since he failed to take a stand on Telangana statehood. The TD has previously performed flip-flops on the Telangana issue. After extending support to Telangana in a letter to then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, and asking the Centre to take a decision on statehood, he joined hands with the TRS for the 2009 polls and even wore a pink khandwa. However, he made an about-turn after Union minister P. Chidambaram announced the initiation of the process for carving out a separate Telangana on December 9, 2009.