Left leaves Uttam high and dry

It appears that the aspirations of the Telangana Congress party chief N Uttam Kumar Reddy to forge a new political alliance in the State will remain a pipedream as the Left parties are not enthused by his pep talk and all the praises he had showered on them at the function to launch Nav Telangana news paper on Saturday.

The Left are in no mood to join hands with any political party on any issue and are more keen to make efforts for developing an alternative to meet the aspirations of the people of Telangana in accordance with the decisions taken at the first conference of the state committee of the CPM held recently and there is no deviation from this says the TCPM secretary Tammineni Veerabhadram.

The Left parties have matured with time ostensibly after the heavy price they paid since aligning with the Congress or the TDP on earlier occasions. Both the parties gained solid mileage from the agitations and protests that were spearheaded by the Communists, who had to face the embarrassment of not being given due credit. The last straw came in the form of an un-parliamentary tag-“ThokaParties”.Smarter by the ‘letdowns’ and struggling to regain lost identity, the Left mandarins opine that there is a need to reinvent the party, all over again.

“It was nice on the part of Uttam to praise our Comrades but we are in no mood to join hands with any other party. Instead, we are making efforts to bring all the ten likeminded Left parties on a single platform and organize agitations on several people-oriented issues,” Veerabhadram pointed out.He said they had a glorious history of sustained peasantry struggle and the movement against the despotic rule of the Nizam. It is time the Left forces unite to fight against the wrong polices of the Centre and the State governments, he opined.

In the post-bifurcation period many problems remain unresolved because people’s problems have taken a backseat. There was no reference to people in the Legislature. CPI (M) will set the roadmap for accomplishing this task. It will give a strong direction to the party in the coming days, Veerbhadram said. The CPI Telangana State Secretary Chada Venkat Reddy also ruled out joining hands with the Telangana Congress in the fight against the TRS government’s anti-poor policies.The CPI, he felt, had already received a big blow by winning only one MLA seat in alliance with the Congress in 2014 in Telangana.

On the other hand, the anti-poor policies and the scams unearthed in the implementation of the schemes launched by the Congress government in the united Andhra Pradesh stopped the Left party from continuing its ‘friendship’ with Congress.He said TDP also urged CPI to join hands, but they preferred to go alone on the people’s issue. ‘But we are firm that we should not join hands with any other political party. We need to rebuild the left parties and emerge as a force on our own.’

He exuded confidence that the left parties would unite in future and emerge as a formidable force by 2019 election.’ We have suffered a lot by entering into alliances in the past and we don’t want to repeat the same mistake again,’ he said.But the Congress party, which is finding it difficult to regain lost ground, is keen on forging an alliance with the Left. They feel that if not a formal alliance they can at least organise joint agitations against the TRS on people’s issues.

The TPCC president feels that it was time for all likeminded forces to come together and take on the TRS. The students are unhappy that so far government had done nothing to create new jobs. It was instead focussing on issues like shifting of Secretariat. Still being optimist, Uttam says he will talk to the Left leaders for a rethink on the issue.‘Politics is a dynamic situation and I am sure they will join hands in taking on the TRS,’ he opined.

By V Ramu Sarma