Congress tie-up with Left parties

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, JUNE 28. The Congress-I has entered into an understanding with the CPI and the CPI(M) for the Panchayat Raj elections leaving roughly about 20 per cent of the MPTCs and ZPTCs to the two parties.

The seat-sharing exercise is being handled by the district-level coordination committees and there has been no major hitch so far, the APCC-I president, Mr. M. Satyanarayana Rao, told reporters on Thursday.

Mr. Rao said the seat adjustment was now confined to the ZPTCs and MPTCs and no decision was taken to support the Left parties in the election of the zilla parishad or mandal parishad chairpersons.

The APCC-I president said the selection of candidates, being done at the district level, was progressing briskly and by tomorrow (the last date for filing nominations) the process would be completed. The problems with the Left parties, if any, would be resolved before the deadline for withdrawal of the nominations.

Mr. Rao said the party's campaign would be launched jointly by him and the leader of the Congress-I Legislature Party (CLP), Dr. Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, in Medak district on July 1. The party manifesto, focussed on the need to transfer the powers and functions as envisaged under the 73rd Constitutional Amendment to the local bodies, would be released in a day or two.

The APCC-I president said there would be no reference to the Telangana issue in the manifesto. There was no understanding with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), he said in response to a question.

Mr. Rao opposed the manner in which the campaign for separate Telangana was run by the Congress-I legislators from the region with the tacit approval by the CLP. It did not help the party in any manner, he regretted, and added that he was not aware as to what was going on till the MLAs submitted a memorandum to the Congress president, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Creation of three new States in the North, especially Uttaranchal, led to the revival of the demand for Telangana.

Otherwise, the TRS would not have come onto the scene, he said.

Mr. Satyanarayana Rao said the electoral understanding with the Left parties had been worked out following hints from the central leadership of the party of a similar coordination with the Communists at the national level.

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Section  : Southern States
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