Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh Cabinet today in a resolution called for setting up a memorial trust for former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and also demanded Bharat Ratna for Telugu Desam founder and former Chief Minister N T Rama Rao.
Narasimha Rao, who hails from Telangana, was the only Telugu leader to become the country’s Prime Minister.
The cabinet which met here under Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu also passed a resolution congratulating Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his successful visit to the United States, while deciding that ministers and top officials will participate in the cleanliness drive of Central government “Swatch Bharat” tomorrow.
The AP cabinet urged the central government to build a memorial or Ghat in memory of Narasimha Rao.
This was being seen as an attempt to embarrass the Congress leadership which had completely disowned its own ex PM after his death and had forced his family to perform his last rite in Hyderabad.
Political observers say that there was a lot of symbolism in this attempt to adopt a Telangana political figure at a time when the Telangana Rashtra Samiti government was trying to completely dissociate itself from the Andhra political figures.
At a time when the Telangana government has decided to remove statues of Andhra literary and political figures from Tank Bund in Hyderabad and send them to Vijayawada, the AP cabinet has decided to install statues of Telangana figures in its proposed capital. The cabinet disapproved the idea of Telangana government to remove the status of Andhra leaders from Hyderabad.
The cabinet meeting also decided on setting up a corporation to deal with the issue of crop loan repayment. In the first phase the corporation will repay 20 per cent of the crop loans to banks as part of the loan waiver scheme.
AP government has also increased the dearness allowance of its employees by six per cent.