MCH polls: BJP non-committal on alliance with TDP

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, NOV. 27. The BJP city unit has reiterated that it will contest the Mayoral post and is geared to field party candidates in all the 100 divisions in the upcoming elections to the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH).

Mr. C. Ramachandra Reddy, president, and Mr. Subash Chanderji, general secretary, have said that there is no change in their stand even after the TDP's announcement that it will field its own nominee for Mayorship. However, they left open the question whether there will be a TDP-BJP poll alliance.

Talking to reporters here on Tuesday, they held that the defection of ``a handful of partymen'' to the Telangana Sadhana Samithi (TSS) had not weakened the BJP. Asserting that the TSS would pose no challenge to them, they said the BJP's main enemy was MIM and the party had the capacity to defeat it.

The BJP leaders said that their party would represent to the Chief Minister, Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu, the ``inefficiency'' of the MCH in allowing innumerable discrepancies to creep into the voters' list since their repeated pleas to the Commissioner had fallen on deaf ears. The latter had refused to extend the time for receiving objections to the list.

They also demanded an all-party meeting to discuss and rectify these ``irregularities''. MCH officials must prepare a report on the basis for the reservations since they had reserved seats for SCs and STs on the basis of the 1991 census, but followed the 2001 voters' list in making BC reservations. As a result, the number of seats reserved for SCs had fallen from 12 to eight and for STs from three to one.

After preparing these lists, the MCH Commissioner had announced that these would be available in all the seven offices of Deputy Commissioners from October 24 and that political parties could send in their objections before October 30. The lists revealed that Reddys were shown as BCs and SCs, while the abbreviation `MIM' was marked against the names of hundreds of voters in Boudhnagar division.

They said there were several discrepancies even in the delimitation of divisions notwithstanding a direction by the AP High Court to rectify them. For instance, there were only 12,000 voters in Sitaphalmandi, 11,000 in Boudhnagar against 48,000 in Banjara Hills and 58,000 in Yousufguda. Apparently, the boundaries were changed without giving much thought to the implications of such alteration.

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Section  : Southern States
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