A group of Congress MPs from Telangana on Sunday met Petroleum Minister S. Jaipal Reddy and urged him to join their fight for a separate Telangana state by resigning from the Lok Sabha.
The MPs, including K. Keshav Rao, G. Vivekanand, Ponnam Prabhakar and K. Sukhinder Reddy, met Reddy at his residence after their arrival from Hyderabad and apprised him of their collective decision to quit their MP post to step up pressure on the Congress High Command to take a decision on the issue.
"We met Jaipal Reddy as he is the senior most Parliamentarian from the state. We urged him to resign his MP post and join our fight for a separate Telangana," Prabhakar, the Karimnagar MP, said after the meeting.
Asked what was Reddy's response to their demand, he said: "He is thinking. We told him our demand."
Nine MPs, including Rao, have threatened to tender their resignation to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar on Monday. Rao, a Rajya Sabha member, will meet Chairman Hamid Ansari and sumbit his resignation. The MPs claimed Reddy assured them that he would talk to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi regarding the separate state issue.
"Due to delay in the process of formation of a Telangana state, the people of the region are in a state of deep anguish," the MPs said in a statement here on Saturday.
They said despite the Centre's statement on December 9, 2009 that steps would be initiated to form a separate Telangana state, the process was stalled by lawmakers from Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra regions in the state.