DS, Kiran Kumar Reddy to rejoin Congress?

​Hyderabad: The leaders who had left the Congress in the past – D Srinivas in Telangana and N Kiran Kumar Reddy in AP - seem to be contemplating to return home. The prodigal children want to be back in the grand old party and steer it through the trouble waters in both the states.

Though it is not yet clear if TRS Rajya Sabha member DS would walk out of Telangana Bhavan for good and rediscover his way to Gandhi Bhavan, what is sure at present is that he has fallen from grace in the TRS.

As far as Kiran Kumar Reddy is concerned, he has no such problem as the party is desperate for strong leaders in Andhra Pradesh. Just as the way any port is a good port for a ship caught in a storm, the Congress party is trying to locate the leaders who had left its company after the division of the state in 2014 and make an attempt to ask them to come back home.

In Telangana, Srinivas’ recent Delhi visit has kicked up a storm with reports doing the rounds that he was in the nation’s capital to meet Congress matriarch Sonia Gandhi and party president Rahul Gandhi and when he could not get appointment with either of them, he had settled for a talk with party senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. But Srinivas denied these reports, saying that he was in Delhi only for repairs to his quarters there and not for meeting any Congress leader. 

But his bete noire and Nizamabad MP K Kavitha has not taken kindly to his travel to Delhi and urged Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao to take action against him for anti-party activities. Kavitha and the other TRS leaders in Nizamabad, including party district president Tula Uma, are of the view that DS has been promoting his son D Arvind, who is now an important leader in the BJP, at the cost of the TRS. 

The Nizamabad leaders allege that DS had been running down the party’s interests by asking the party workers to support his son. Kavitha and Arvind have been at logger heads for a long time after Arvind began stepping up attack on her accusing her of corruption and the MP believes that Arvind’s father DS is behind his verbal fusillade against her. But Arvind says he has nothing to do with his father and that he joined the BJP at his own accord. He says dragging his father into the controversy was stretching the narrative a little too far.

Apparently under the influence of his daughter Kavitha, KCR, after giving time to DS to meet him on Wednesday evening, played hard to get at, with his office telling the Nizamabad leader that the Chief Minster was preoccupied and that he would not be able to see him now. Later, Srinivas said that he would meet KCR whenever he sends word to him. But it requires no political sagacity to foresee what future lay in store for him in the TRS. 

He has already become a persona non grata for the TRS and the only tenuous thread that keeps him with the pink party is that he belongs to Munnuru Kapu, a backward caste, and whose population is quite substantial in Nizamabad area.  Chandrasekhar Rao knows that banking on Reddys alone would not help him in winning the elections and that he would have to take the others too on board.

There is speculation that Srinivas would finally join the Congress but the Rajya Sabha member is still keeping his cards close to his chest, while the Congress is waiting impatiently for him to return home.

While this is so, there was activity at the house of former chief minister and leader from Chittoor N Kiran Kumar Reddy with Congress MP T Subba Rami Reddy meeting him and persuading him to come back to the Congress. A day earlier, former union minister MM Pallam Raju called on him and explained to him how desperate the Congress was for a leader in AP and that he should fill the vacuum. Though Kiran Kumar Reddy is not interested in any positions in the state, he might play the ball by joining the Congress and campaigning for it to improve its foot prints in AP. He wants to move to the Centre after the elections.

Kiran Kumar Reddy is known for his ferocious battle to keep the state united at a time when the Congress was contemplating to divide the state.  When the party ignored his demand to keep the state united, he left the Congress and formed his own party Jai Samaikyandhra Party and addressed a couple of meetings but the party with lack of any 

network at the ground level folded up soon with the Telugu Desam Party gaining in strength. After 2014 elections, Kiran Kumar Reddy disappeared from political scene in the state.