Hyderabad: With the Centre making it clear that it will not give the Special Category Status to Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam-BJP alliance in the state was on the verge of collapse and the state was in the grip of political uncertainty.
The Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu was coming under tremendous pressure from within his party to announce severing the relations with the BJP led National Democratic Alliance and withdraw his two ministers from Modi’s cabinet.
At yesterday’s Telugu Desam Legislature Party meeting in Amarvati Naidu’s poser on what the party should do now, a majority of party MLAs voted in favour of ending the alliance with the saffron party while only six MLAs said that the party should wait for some more time. According to the sources Naidu was infuriated over the Union Finance Ministry “leaking” to the media that the Centre will not give Special Category Status to AP.
The meeting was held in the backdrop of Union Finance Ministry sources informing the media that if the SCS was granted to Andhra, many more states, specially from South will also make similar demands.
The finance ministry said the Centre would give to Andhra Pradesh what was promised under the Special Package.
They also claimed that the Centre had already provided Rs 125 billion (Dh7 billion) for the Polavaram project but the state government had not submitted the accounts of even a single rupee so far. However, the claim was strongly rebutted by the state government and said that the center had provided only Rs 53.40 billion for the project.