Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has asked all sections of people, particularly the intellectuals, to raise their voice against the goings on in the country, including the attempts being made to divide society.
Paying tributes to father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi and former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri on their birth anniversary, he alleged that the two protectors of the country “jawan (soldier) and kisan (farmer)”, were being put to hardships. Soldiers were being denied benefits in the name of Agnipath and the Central government was not ensuring remunerative price to the produce of farmers.
Speaking after unveiling a 16-foot-tall statue of Gandhi in meditation posture on the premises of Gandhi General Hospital in Secunderabad here on Sunday, the Chief Minister remarked that some political dwarfs in the country were trying to paint themselves larger than Gandhi and said they could never emulate his principles and ideals or become like Mahatma Gandhi.
Recollecting the then US President Barack Obama’s speech in Parliament made in November 2010, when he (KCR) was an MP, he quoted the former as saying that he (Obama) was mindful that he “might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared and inspired with America and the world”.
The Chief Minister stated that several greats of the world from Martin Luther King to Albert Einstein to Dalai Lama had spoken of drawning inspiration from Gandhi’s life, his ideology and path of pursuing truth and his non-violent resistance as the only logical and moral approach in the struggle for justice and progress.
Coming to himself, Mr. Rao said, several had dismissed (belittled) him stating that how a frail personality would achieve statehood to Telangana when he had taken up the cause in 2001. “But, every time I came across an antagonist, I used to close my eye and remember Mahatma Gandhi and his word,” the Chief Minister said, adding that it was again Gandhi who was the inspiration behind his government’s Palle Pragathi and Pattana Pragathi programmes for uplift of villages and towns.
He complimented the services of Gandhi Hospital doctors and the support staff during the two waves of COVID-19 pandemic in spite of facing threat to their lives from the infectious disease. He stated that his government had tried to spread the message of Gandhi during the fortnight-long Independence Day celebrations earlier this year by providing an opportunity to about 25 lakh students to watch Gandhi feature film to learn about his life and the fight for freedom on the silver screen by arranging 5,000 screens.
Earlier, he paid tributes to the Mahatma Gandhi statue on the MG Road. Ministers T. Srinivas Yadav, T. Harish Rao and V. Srinivas Goud, GHMC Mayor G. Vijayalaxmi, several MPs, MLCs, MLAs, other elected representatives and officials participated.
