The calculations went awry. The numbers did not add up. KCR had to do some rethinking.

 

"Okay, I have to leave now," K. Chandrasekhar Rao said.
We wondered where he was headed as he suddenly got up to leave.
A few other reporters and I were sitting across the table, talking with him. Usually, after addressing a press conference, he would go to his chair and table in what served as an office room adjacent to the hall.
This was at another premises before the present Telangana Bhavan was constructed in Banjara Hills and from where the party started functioning in 2006.
We were not aware of any other political activity for the day when we sat with KCR in his office chatting with him. So, when he suddenly announced that he had to leave, I could not help asking him: "Where?"
"To Koti," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"To buy footwear," he answered.
KCR was particular about buying his footwear from that very shop. The right size. The right fit. The right number.
For KCR, the president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi that he founded, politics too was about the right fit and the right numbers.
The numbers he got in the 2004 Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh were far from satisfactory for him. In the polls, the TRS and Congress were in an alliance. Congress got enough seats to form the government on its own.
KCR expected that there would inevitably be a coalition government in which the Congress would have to depend on TRS support for survival. He would then press hard for a separate Telangana state.
The TRS had just 26 MLAs and five MPs.
Surely, 26 was too small a number to press for the huge demand of a separate Telangana state. Congress strongman Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy was not too enthusiastic about a tie-up with the TRS. The Congress high command, however, was in favour of it.
At the house of the then TPCC president D. Srinivas, the seat-sharing arrangement was announced. The TRS was to contest 54 seats, while the lion's share — 234 seats — went to the Congress. In the 294-member House, 148 seats were required for a majority. The Congress, on its own, got 185 seats and did not require TRS support.
On May 14, 2004, I wrote a report in The Times of India, Hyderabad. It appeared under the headline: "5 MPs and 26 MLAs, still this man's not singing."
The talks with the Congress had gone too far for the TRS to turn back from the alliance. KCR was not entirely happy with the number of seats the TRS got in the seat-sharing arrangement and also with the Assembly tally. If the TRS contested 54 seats in the alliance and won only 26, surely something had gone wrong somewhere.
He did not have the numbers. So what could he do with those numbers? Where could he take his demand for a separate Telangana state when the numbers were not on his side?
Though the Congress did not need TRS support to form the government, YSR invited the TRS to be part of the ministry. YSR formed his ministry on May 14, 2004. He expanded it on June 23, 2004, inducting TRS MLAs into the ministry. T. Harish Rao, Nayani Narasimha Reddy, A. Chandra Shekar, G. Vijayarama Rao, V. Lakshmikantha Rao and Santosh Reddy became ministers.
Did the Congress find a way to keep KCR under leash? With no numbers to raise a strong voice and his MLAs now inducted into the ministry, had KCR been neutralised for good?
But KCR responded aggressively. He pulled out of the government. Five of his ministers resigned from the YSR government on July 4, 2005. Another minister resigned on July 13, 2005. KCR decided that his MLAs would quit the Assembly too.
On March 4, 2006, however, only 16 of the 26 TRS MLAs resigned. The remaining MLAs rebelled and chose not to resign.
But KCR himself was part of the Union ministry in the UPA government. He had been elected from the Karimnagar Lok Sabha constituency in 2004 and became a minister in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's ministry on May 23, 2004.
When he realised that his demand for a separate Telangana state was going nowhere, he quit the government on August 24, 2006. He also resigned from the Karimnagar Lok Sabha seat, contested again and won once more.
He could do little with the numbers he had. So, all five MPs resigned too.
KCR was once again free to push the movement for a separate Telangana state forward.
It was time to change his footwear again to go to the masses. Now he could sing his own familiar tune. Unhindered. Uniterrupted.
---
**The news report I wrote, published on May 14, 2004, in The Times of India, Hyderabad:**
**5 MPs and 26 MLAs, still this man's not singing**
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Hyderabad: A separate Telangana state may not become a reality. Not in the next six months. Not even in the foreseeable future.
Until just before Lok Sabha results were declared on Thursday morning, everything was going according to K Chandrashekhar Rao's 'vyooham' (strategy). He foresaw the victory of at least five out of the six TRS candidates in the Lok Sabha polls, but what he did not imagine and wish was a comfortable win for his ally, the Congress at the Centre.
With it appearing like the Congress can still form the government without requiring the TRS support, the party will find it difficult to peddle the Telangana dream to reality.
Rao had wished for a tight situation for the Congress in which it would have to depend on the TRS. That has not happened. A dream has to be chased all over again.
It's a sweet and sour victory for K Chandrashekhar Rao in both the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls.
In the Assembly elections, it won 26 seats but unfortunately for the TRS, the Congress does not need its support to form the government here.
KCR was banking heavily on a situation at the Centre being conducive for him to play a crucial role in facilitating the formation of a Congress-led government. But at every public meeting he addressed, he told the crowds that the TRS was not alone in its quest to realise a separate Telangana state.
He never lost an opportunity to say support from the TRS and its dream came from other small parties led by Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar, Ajit Singh in Uttar Pradesh and M Karunanidhi, Vaiko, and Ramadoss in Tamil Nadu.
**CHASING MIRAGE**
It is the combined strength of all these parties that KCR is banking on to bring pressure on the Congress to accept his demand for a separate Telangana state.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi during her election campaign in the state had never promised a separate Telangana state if the Congress rode to power. And after the Assembly results were out, chief minister-designate Y S Rajasekhara Reddy has avoided making any commitment on Telangana, always warding off the question that it was something the party high command should consider.
On a strong wicket now, the party high command has every reason to look the other way when the TRS chief talks of a separate Telangana state.


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