Congress Leads Chalo Assembly Rally On Farmer Issues

Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) President N Uttam Kumar Reddy described the Congress party's Chalo Assembly protest as a success, despite the government using the police to foil it.

He reiterated that the rally was not a show of strength but a mode of protest to expose the failure of Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao to honour the promise that he made to the farmers on the floor of the House.

Instead of admitting the failure and taking corrective measures to help the ailing farming community, the TRS government had used force to foil the rally, he alleged. He said that over 50,000 farmers and Congress workers from across Telangana had been arrested by the police. While several leaders and workers were taken into preventive custody two days ago, farmers were chased and arrested from their fields, he claimed. He warned the police officials against acting like TRS activists.

Speaking along with CLP leader K Jana Reddy, Leader Of Opposition in the Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir and other senior leaders, Uttam Kumar Reddy strongly condemned the TRS government for treating the ongoing agrarian crisis in the state as a non-issue.

The TPCC chief said that the crop loan waiver implemented by the TRS government did not help the farmers due to being done in installments, and demanded that the state government pay the interest amount which had gotten accumulated due to the delay in clearing the installments.

"The Chief Minister had agreed to pay the interest on multiple occasion in both the Assembly and the Council. However, he did not honour his own commitment. That's not all - not a single farmer who lost his crop due to natural calamities has been paid any compensation during the last three years. Then, lakhs of farmers were also denied crop insurance although they promptly paid their premiums. And the TRS government has also failed to help the families of over 3,500 farmers who committed suicides," he said.

Continuing to list out the "injustices" to the farmer community, Reddy said that thousands of farmers who grew cotton, maize and paddy had lost their crops due to recent rains, but that the government did not even enumerate the losses, forget extend any help. While chilli farmers were denied remunerative prices in the last Khariff season, this time cotton farmers were not being paid the MSP of Rs. 4,320 per quintal anywhere in the state.

He said that the Congress was only demanding justice for the farmers, but KCR viewed all demands through a narrow political prism, and preferred pushing lakhs of farmers into further crisis rather than let the opposition get any credit for helping farmers. He vowed that the Congress would however not keep quiet until it got justice for the farmers.

The TPCC chief also condemned the conduct of the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) meetings of both the Assembly and the Council. He said that it was shocking that Deputy Speaker Padma Devender Reddy held the BAC meeting while the Leaders Of Opposition and all Congress MLAs were arrested and kept in police stations. Ridiculing KCR's intention to hold the session for 50 days, he said that it would meaningless in a democracy to hold an Assembly session even for 500 days after throwing out the entire Opposition from the House.

He said that it was mandatory to allow the Leader Of Opposition to speak whenever he wanted in the Legislature, and that all members had a right to express and register their protests. However, the TRS government wanted to run the House as per its will and not according to the Constitution. He said that if KCR wanted to hold the Assembly without the Opposition parties, then he could hold the session at TRS Bhavan itself.

Reddy said that the conditions were not so bad even in the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh. Telangana was expected to set a great example of democracy for the entire country, but KCR had taken things from bad to worse, he alleged.

Earlier in the day, Reddy led the Chalo Assembly rally from Gandhi Bhavan with thousands of workers participating. However, hundreds of police personnel, who were deployed around Gandhi Bhavan and other routes, took the TPCC chief and other leaders into custody and shifted them to the Madannapet Police Station. They were released later.

Other leaders and activists of the Congress were also arrested at different places in the city.

However, as mentioned earlier, Reddy said that despite the arrests of thousands of party workers and farmers, and despite several obstacles created by the police, the rally was a grand success, and thanked everyone who participated in it.