KTR dares Chandrababu Naidu to face theft probe

Hyderabad: TRS working president K T Rama Rao on Monday challenged the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu to face inquiry and come clean if he is innocent in the data theft case.

Addressing a press conference here at Telangana Bhavan, Rama Rao said a whistle-blower Lokeshwar Reddy had lodged a complaint with the Telangana police, alleging data theft by a company, named IT Grids. It stole individual data of people of Andhra Pradesh.

Telangana police had booked a case and launched investigation. “Why should TDP leaders have fears just because a case was booked against a private company. Face the inquiry and come clean. If they have not done anything wrong, why they should have fears,” asked Rama Rao.

KTR alleged that the TDP leaders had prepared dummy profiles on social media, alleging that the Telangana State government was stealing data. These types of things would not work in present-day politics as the social media is active. He said Chandrababu Naidu has the habit of committing mistakes and getting caught. It was evident in cash for vote case where the audio tapes had the voice of AP Chief Minister. 

Rama Rao took exception to the TDP leaders running hashtag #TSGovtStealsData on Twitter. The tweets on this hashtag showed that the people tweeting about this are not either from Andhra or from Telangana and the number of tweets were in thousands. Some of the tweets were from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and other States. Even the tweets in Telugu appeared in such a way that they had no idea of Telugu language. 

“If it is seen in depth, it shows that the TDP has given huge money to an agency for creating an artificial trend and made tweets with fake twitter accounts. A model from Mumbai Ria, an actor Santosh Shukla, a twitter account from Gurugram named Bollywood Chock also tweeted against the TDP government,” said Rao. 

He alleged that the AP police had abused the whistle-blower. What is the role for AP police to play in Telangana State, he questioned. He said  though it is a joint capital, the jurisdiction is under Telangana State police.