Telangana assembly election: Congress, TDP, CPI form ‘Mahakutami’ 

Senior members of Congress, TDP and CPI during their announcement of a grand alliance in Telangana.

New Delhi: The Congress, Telugu Desam Party and the Communist Party of India joined hands to form an alliance, which they named as “Mahakutami” (grand alliance), to take on the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti in Telangana for the state assembly election. The leaders of these parties had announced this immediately after holding an initial round of talks.

This will be the first time the Telugu Desam Party, led by Chandrababu Naidu, will join hands with the Congress in its 35-year history.

The Telangana Congress president, N Uttam Kumar Reddy, after discussions between the three parties, said they would wait for other parties with “similar ideology”, like M Kodharam’s Telangana Jan Samiti, the Left parties and Bahujan Left Front, to join the alliance. He said that seat-sharing talks will start after other parties join the Mahakutami.

Reddy said, “It was decided to work out a common minimum programme of all the political parties in the alliance and this programme would be included in the election manifesto of the Mahakutami. This will be in addition to the manifestoes of the respective political parties.”

“The main objective of the coalition was to eliminate ‘the bad and autocratic rule of KCR-family in Telangana’,” he further added.

TDP Telangana unit president, L Ramana, said that to defeat TRS, there is a need for a grand alliance, “which is not allowing opposition and general public to raise voice against the state government.”

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