By IANS
Hyderabad : Under pressure from a section of leaders to take a clear stand on the issue of separate statehood to Telangana, Andhra Pradesh’s main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Monday constituted a five-member committee to look into the demand.
The committee comprising five senior leaders will go into various aspects of the long-pending demand for a separate Telangana state and submit its report to the party leadership.
It comprises former minister and a key leader from Telangana region T. Devender Goud, the party’s parliamentary leader K. Yerran Naidu and former ministers Y. Ramakrishnudu, N. Janardhan Reddy and K. Krishnamurthy.
The move is significant in view of the upcoming by-elections to four Lok Sabha and 16 assembly seats in Telangana region. Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) legislators recently quit en masse to protest the central government’s delay in carving out a Telangana state.
Senior TDP leaders like Goud and K. Srihari want the party leadership to take a clear stand on Telangana in view of next year’s elections. They feel that there were strong sentiments among people of the region for separate statehood and the party should take note of them.
Srihari had recently gone to the extent of saying that party president N. Chandrababu Naidu should come out openly in support of separate Telangana if he wanted to become chief minister again.
Naidu, who was unhappy with the utterances of some leaders on the issue, has so far maintained that the party would take an appropriate decision at an appropriate time.
Naidu, who was chief minister from 1995 to 2004, had then opposed the bifurcation of the state.
The TDP politburo that met at the NTR Trust Bhavan, the party headquarters, also took stock of the political situation in view of the proposed plans by Telugu superstar Chirnajeevi to float a new political party.
The actor’s brother-in-law and film producer Allu Arvind recently stated that he might launch a new party in two months.