Putting endless speculations of their merger to rest, senior leaders from both the Congress and the YSR Telangana Party (YSRTP) confirmed to The Quint that the two parties will not meld before the Telangana Assembly elections.
All decisions related to their merger have been put off until after the state elections and the resolution of other concerns put forth by both parties.
In early September, YSR Telangana Party founder YS Sharmila met former Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi in Hyderabad on the sidelines of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting and initiated discussions of a possible merger.
Subsequently, she set a date – 30 September – to finalise the merger between both parties.
"Some people in the Congress are feeling threatened by the presence of YS Sharmila because of the legacy she carries of her late father and former chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh YS Rajasekhara Reddy. My advice to her was to join the Congress without setting any conditions. I told her that aspirations can be turned around into possibilities once the party's capability is showcased," a senior leader of the YSRTP told The Quint.
On the other hand, a senior Congress leader who is part of one of the election committees said that while there was a host of reasons why the merger has been put off indefinitely, the most pressing reason ostensibly arose from the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) President Revanth Reddy's stiff resistance of the proposed merger.
'Not Clear on What She Brings to the Table'
In no uncertain terms, Revanth Reddy, who is close to Rahul Gandhi, is known to have conveyed that the merger would brook no benefit for the Congress in the state. Can the Congress be strengthened? That's the question everyone in the Telangana Congress seems to be asking.
Sharmila comes from Andhra Pradesh's Kadapa district; her brother YS Jagan Mohan Reddy is the current chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, and her late father was strongly opposed to the idea of carving out a separate Telangana while he was in power.
So, her presence is deemed to be politically irrelevant in Telangana, and trucking with her, the Congress believes, would be calamitous, given that the grand old party is already sensing a positive sentiment towards it from the people.
"There is no win-win situation here. Nobody is clear about what she brings to the table. While the Congress would like to benefit from YSR's legacy, they know she is not a force to reckon with in Telangana," said Koteswara Rao, an analyst who was previously associated with a political party.
As soon as rumours of a possible merger between the two parties started to surface, Telangana Industries and IT Minister KT Rama Rao lost no time in clobbering the Congress over uniting with a party whose leader was antagonistic to Telangana's statehood.
It is this carping that the Congress would like to distance with elections approaching in less than two months.
While Sharmila offered not to contest the elections this time around, her party men differed with her on this view when her request seeking 15 seats for her party members in the upcoming Telangana elections was shot down by the Congress summarily.
"Politics is like fighting a war. You want to win, not to be a martyr," said T Devender Reddy, a YSRTP spokesperson.
'Lack of Trust, Evading Conflict'
With the possibility of a merger not seeing the light of day any time soon, the YSR Telangana Party has seen quite a few exits in the last few months noticing the lack of prospects. Having entered the political fray in July 2021, the party has been in existence for just over two years.
Those watching politics closely in the state say that they are unable to ascribe a clear motive to her party's existence. "Trust is a key factor that she does not seem to inspire. There are many in the Congress camp who believe she is the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) plant to split votes just like the Congress created actor Chiranjeevi's Praja Rajyam Party (PRP) before the 2009 polls," said S Nagesh, former journalist and now a political analyst.
Chiranjeevi is a Kapu and the Kapu community votes that used to be traditionally claimed by Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) went to the PRP and subsequently got transferred to the Congress.
What also could have been a deal breaker is Sharmila's vocally acerbic campaign against the Congress when her brother Jagan Reddy was jailed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in a disproportionate assets case in 2012. Both Sharmila and her mother Vijaya Lakshmi staged protests and blamed the Congress for jailing Jagan.
The Congress was in power from 2009-2014 in then united Andhra Pradesh with N Kiran Kumar Reddy as the chief minister. If political credentials stack up against Sharmila, there are personality related concerns as well.
"The Congress prefers those that toe their line. Her aggression was on display when she was arrested by the Telangana police after an altercation with a male police officer during her sit-in protest. She refused to get out of her vehicle even as it was being towed away. This is not something that the Congress is used to," said Koteswara Rao.
The Congress would prefer its potential joinee to play by the book and not bend the rules, Rao added.
At 49, Sharmila, with her ambition in tow, could perhaps be directly entering into a combat with many young Turks in the Congress whom the grand old party would like to evade in an election year. Konda Raghav Reddy, a former YSRTP leader who claims to have knowledge of the conversation between Sharmila and the Gandhis said, "She has been asked by the Gandhis to test the waters in Andhra Pradesh."
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