New Delhi: A group of Congress MPs from
Telangana on Sunday met Petroleum Minister S Jaipal Reddy and
urged him to join their fight for a separate Telangana state
by resigning from the Lok Sabha.
The MPs, including K Keshav Rao, G Vivekanand, Ponnam
Prabhakar and K Sukhinder Reddy, met Reddy at his residence
after their arrival from Hyderabad and apprised him of their
collective decision to quit their MP post to step up pressure
on the Congress High Command to take a decision on the issue.
"We met Jaipal Reddy as he is the senior most
Parliamentarian from the state. We urged him to resign his
MP post and join our fight for a separate Telangana,"
Prabhakar, the Karimnagar MP, said after the meeting.
Asked what was Reddy's response to their demand, he
said: "He is thinking. We told him our demand."
Nine MPs, including Rao, have threatened to tender
their resignation to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar tomorrow.
Rao, a Rajya Sabha member, will meet Chairman Hamid Ansari and
sumbit his resignation.
The MPs claimed Reddy assured them that he would talk
to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia
Gandhi regarding the separate state issue.
"Due to delay in the process of formation of a
Telangana state, the people of the region are in a state of
deep anguish," the MPs said in a statement here yesterday.
They said despite the Centre's statement on December
9, 2009 that steps would be initiated to form a separate
Telangana state, the process was stalled by lawmakers from
Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra regions in the state.
PTI
First Published: Sunday, July 03, 2011, 23:44