Chandrababu joins issue with Jaitley over according special status to AP

A delegation of Telugu Desam Party MPs and the two TDP ministers in the Union Cabinet will meet the Prime Minister on Monday and apprise him of the situation on the demand pertaining to the promised special status for Andhra Pradesh, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has said.

He was speaking at a press meet here on Sunday following the debate in the Rajya Sabha on the promised special status to the State on Friday. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had virtually made it clear in the Rajya Sabha that it would not be possible to accord such status to AP in the present circumstances. The debate in the Rajya Sabha was in response to a private member's Bill on the issue introduced by Congress MP KVP Ramachandra Rao.

‘Not acceptable’ “Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's remarks are not at all acceptable to the people of Andhra Pradesh and they run contrary to the assurances given by the senior leaders of both the Congress and the BJP, who together bifurcated the State against the wishes of the people of AP. It is a matter of life and death for AP,” Naidu said.

He added that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had given a clear assurance on the floor of the Rajya Sabha that AP would be accorded special category status for five years and “the overenthusiastic” BJP leaders had in fact asked for ten years then and now they are pleading that after the 14th Finance Commission’s report it cannot be done.

Disagreeing with Arun Jaitley's remark in the Rajya Sabha that the “renewed financial architecture” after the 14th Finance Commission’s report did not permit according of special status to AP, the Chief Minister said, “It has got nothing to do with the Finance Commission’s report. It is also not correct on the part of Jaitley to state that the Finance Commission has given funds liberally to AP. The net benefit to the State has gone down.”

Bandh call In response to a question on the bandh call given by the YSR Congress on August 2 in the State over the issue, he said the Opposition party should not indulge in “such disruptive politics.” The YSR Congress should exert pressure on the Centre and not cause inconvenience to the public here, he added.

In a direct attack on the Congress and a veiled one on the BJP, he said, “People of the State and the country are watching. They are the final arbiters in a democracy. The Congress has paid a heavy price for its opportunistic politics. It could not win a single seat in the AP Assembly or a single Lok Sabha seat from the State in 2014.”