By IANS
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said Thursday it fully supports the creation of a separate Telangana state by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh, and rubbished the Congress allegation that it was indulging in a double-speak.
“The state of Telangana should be formed immediately. We will support any bill on the issue,” BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar told reporters here. He added that party president Rajnath Singh and prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani had advocated this in Hyderabad recently.
Javadekar was replying to a charge levelled against BJP by Congress spokesperson M. Veerappa Moily Wednesday that its stand in Andhra Pradesh differed from that at the national level.
He said the BJP was even open to an alliance with all political parties that support formation of Telangana state, but refused to name any political party.
The Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), a political party in the forefront of the Telangana movement, was an ally of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) but broke away when its demand was not met.
With BJP’s Andhra Pradesh ally Telugu Desam Party (TDP) looking for formation of a Third Front, the former is looking at TRS as a possible ally, according to party sources.
BJP has launched a massive signature campaign in Telangana region to gather support for the demand.
“We have always supported the formation of smaller states. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government formed Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand without any bloodshed,” Javadekar said.
The BJP feels there is no need for the formation of a second State Reorganisation Commission (SRC) for the formation of any state. “We formed the three states without SRC. The proposal for formation of Telangana is anyway mentioned in the first SRC,” Javadekar said.
The party also pulled up a Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Pranab Mukherjee, which was set up to look into the feasibility of forming a separate state of Telangana, saying it was not doing anything on the issue.