The Telangana unit of the BJP today urged Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan to use her powers as the custodian of the Indian Constitution to advise the State Election Commission (SEC) to postpone the
upcoming local body elections to be held on April 30.
National BJP OBC Morcha head D K Laxman, former MLA N V S S Prabhakar, and several other party leaders wrote a letter to the Governor on the issue and appealed to her to intervene.
In their letter, they told her that the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic had been wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of people across the nation and the state, and added that the situation in Telangana had also reached alarming proportions as indicated by the rapid rise in the number of cases.
"Telangana has reported over 6,000 positive cases and 18 deaths on Tuesday alone. Also, there are reports that the number of deaths each day is much higher than the figure that is being revealed to us. Despite this grave situation, the Telangana government has been lackadaisical about controlling the pandemic. It has failed miserably in bolstering the health infrastructure of the state to prepare hospitals to deal with the deadly disease. There has been no real attempt or urgency to deal with the current medical emergency," the leaders charged.
"The SEC in consultation with the state government had announced the local body elections for 5 municipalities and 2 municipal corporations. However, by the time the announcement for the election was released, on April 16, the pandemic situation had already reached catastrophic proportions. It is no longer appropriate to hold the election especially when the people of our state are currently running from pillar to post in search of beds, oxygen, medicines, and even space in graveyards," they added.
The BJP bigwigs alleged that Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao wanted to "finish the elections" before the announcement of the results of the elections held in five other states due to superstitious reasons, and asked Soundararajan once again to push for the postponement of the elections.