stanley theodore 
stanley_theodore@yahoo.com
Hyderabad, 31 July
The 30-year-old Telugu Desam Party and the two-year-old YSR Congress stand singed with the announcement that Telangana would be the 29th state of the Indian Union.
If elections are held in Andhra Pradesh — notification of a new state would take six to seven months — Mr N Chandrababu Naidu and Mr YS Jaganmohan Reddy would be lucky to bag any seats in the Telangana region.
As far as Mr Naidu is concerned, he wrote the Doomsday script all by himself. On 8 December, 2009, he told an all party meeting here that he was willing to support a resolution favouring creating Telangana state in the Assembly. Two days later, on 10 December, 2009, when the resolution was to be taken up in the Assembly, Mr Naidu did a U-turn on the floor of the Assembly and asked how the main Opposition party could be expected to support "a decision taken in the dead of the night". Then, he was seen as an integrationist. For people in Telangana though, he was an obstructionist. Six months before that, he had stitched together an alliance, the Mahakootami (Grand Alliance) with the TRS and the Left parties for the 2009 general elections. Althoughhe lost, he had postured as a protagonist for Telangana. Today, he held a Press conference and said the TDP stood for the “unity of Telugus”.
The YSR Congress had adopted an ambivalent stand towards the statehood issue during its two-and-half year existence, as it felt the Centre would not create a state which would be unviable. Even though it consistently said it was for the Centre to decide on the issue and they would accept any decision which the Centre takes, for people in Telangana, this was no stand at all.
Before that, when Mr Reddy was a Congress MP he had held a placard seeking the continuation of an integrated state on the floor of the Lok Sabha. In all fairness, he did not have a choice as all political parties were split along regional lines; he had only done what other regional MPs did. But in the eyes of people in Telangana, Mr Reddy was not a person to be trusted on separate statehood.
The Congress is smug in the belief that it kicked the slot machine and the coins will start pouring out.
In Telangana though, the overwhelming feeling is it played with people&’s sentiments by inordinately delaying statehood.
Only time will tell if people will forgive Congress, as it has actually granted statehood, or if it would be similarly singed. In the new reality, all these perceptions have become realities.