Development takes a back seat due to petty politics

Tadipatri (Anantapur): Tadipatri municipality, which occupied second place after Pune as model and lovely municipality in the country, and pride of the state and district, has become a casualty to nasty politics, all because the Municipal Chairman J C Prabhakar Reddy, is politically incorrect and on the wrong side of the ruling political dispensation.

‘The King is dead. Long live the King’ is an English saying. Here is a case of killing the Kingship and the Kingdom just because the King according to them is alive and not loyal. How can they kill civic development, create hurdles and road blocks every day and massacre the once beautiful town just because the chairman in question belonged to a rival political party, asks Surendra Reddy, a business man.

Even Y S Rajasekhara Reddy had differences with JC Diwakar Reddy but he was graceful towards the family. He never mixed political and personal rivalries, he added.

Abdul Basha, a social worker and well-wisher of the infamous town sobs, heaves a sigh and asks what sort of politics is this which surcharged the climate with hate, animosity derailing development.

The employees have been sandwiched between the local MLA Peddareddy and Municipal Chairman JC Prabhakar Reddy.

The former holds rival meetings and orders officials to attend his meeting only to negate a civic meeting chaired by JCP.

The chairman several times staged dharna and sit-in at the municipal office to highlight the political harassment from the MLA and the state government. A vertical split was engineered among the officials and employees forcing some good officers to go on transfer and leave, muttered an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The people of Tadipatri town gave a mandate to Prabhakar Reddy and thereby to TDP in 2019 despite the pro-Jagan wave sweeping the state because of the ‘larger than life’ image he earned as the civic chief, who propelled the municipality to national fame. He not only engineered innovative development in leaps and bounds but made it the richest municipality in the country after Pune. He also visited Western countries to study and implement unique models of development. Aruna Kumari, an educated housewife told The Hans India that impressed by the performance of Prabhakar Reddy, the town citizens including her voted for him, but he is being harassed by the ruling party functionaries.

She wondered what democracy all about is when two public servants belonging to two different political parties elected for different responsibilities are not allowed to function in the name of political hegemony. The nation’s second-best municipality has been reduced into a political boiling pot with politics taking precedence over people and development.