Look before you leap, Mr PK

Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan's Joint Fact Finding Committee (JFC) has fallen flat on its face. To the political watchers, this is not surprising as it was waiting to happen.

The committee was looking for a direction from Pawan Kalyan after it did number crunching of what the Centre had promised and what it had delivered. Now the committee has been wound up since the actor- politician has lost interest in it, almost overnight.

The actor created a flutter when he suddenly appeared on the scene in the second week of February and announced formation of the JFC to go into the conundrum of special category status and other economic issues.

He roped in leaders as diverse in ideology as Lok Satta president Dr Jayapraksh Narayan, former MP Undavalli Arun Kumar, Left leaders K Ramakrishna and P Madhu, former bureaucrat K Padmanabhaiah, former chief secretary IYR Krishna Rao, among others.

There was much fanfare as Pawan Kalyan, after releasing the logo for the JFC, outlined what he expected the committee to do, which was mainly going into the SCS and promises made in the AP Reorganisation Act.  He impressed the audience so much so that Undavalli had said he liked the idea because of the no-nonsense approach of the actor-politician.

The committee, after doing its exercise came up with a report in the first week of March that the Centre owed Rs 74,542 crore to the State and released a break up for the amount. The committee concluded that unless special category status was delivered, the State would not be able to rise from the ruins in which it lay.

Jana Sena sources kept saying that Pawan Kalyan would give a direction on the recommendations that the committee had made at the party's foundation day at Guntur in the middle of last month but there too there was no mention about JFC or its recommendations. Then the blazing guns of Pawan Kalyan fell silent and people began talking less and less of the JFC and its report. 

When Jayaprakash Narayan found that enough was enough with waiting, he declared a couple of days ago that the JFF stood disbanded and in its a place a new committee was being constituted with a totally new team of public policy experts. The new committee has as its members former IPS officers C Anjaneya Reddy and HJ Dora, 14th Finance Commission member M Govinda Rao, farmers' leader P Chengal Reddy, CESS professor S Galab, former Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh  MN Rao and former Special Chief Secretary of AP Kaki Madhava Rao. 

One of the disbanded committee members, on condition of anonymity, said that he associated with the initiative after Pawan Kalyan convinced him that it was strictly apolitical in nature and that it only wanted to focus on the issue at stake. 

His sudden lack of interest in the committee and its recommendations was attributed by some to the committee calling the Centre to account for the economic and financial ills of the state and for the denial of special category status and other benefits.

His trenchant criticism of Telugu Desam Party at the Jana Sena's foundation day meeting also made one wonder if he was acting at BJP's bidding. As he was more inclined to BJP rather than the TDP since beginning with his own admission that he had high regard for Narendra Modi when he campaigned for BJP-TDP combine in 2014 elections, there is now speculation over how he would come home at the end of the game, as an independent fighter or as one who is part of a formation led by the BJP.

His detractors argue that if the committee fell by the wayside, there was no surprise in it. "Pawan Kalyan is known to start something and drop it midway through. The formation of the committee of experts is the latest example of the actor's lack of will in continuing something to its logical end."

Now that the new committee is in place, it remains to be seen how it would go ahead with the tasks in its handa. But formation of the new committee has dented the image of Pawan Kalyan that he lacked commitment to a cause for which he says he is standing up for. Though the new committee is not bothered about the political fallout, it did sully the image of Pawan Kalyan. In other words, his lack of focus on continuing the work the committee had done came as a blessing in disguise for the Telugu Desam Party, which has been facing attack from three quarters - Pawan Kalyan, YS Jaganmohan Reddy and the BJP on a day-to-day basis.

With Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu shifting gears rapidly to emerge as the unquestioned leader of the movement for justice for AP,  Pawan Kalyan's short-lived capers help strengthen his armour. Naidu is getting ready to lead a delegation to Delhi on special category status even as the YSRC is planning to ask its MPs to resign and go on an indefinite hunger strike. Meanwhile the BJP has already deployed its national leaders Ram Madhav and GVL Narasimha Rao to burn Chandrababu Naidu at the stake. It will be in Pawan Kalyan's interest if he watches his every step.