Reiterating that Andhra Pradesh needs a single capital city and multiple capitals would serve no purpose except fetching political mileage for the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), TDP national general secretary N. Lokesh said Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy had endorsed the idea of Amaravati when he was the Leader of the Opposition and went on to float the concept of three capitals on the basis of the failed South African model.
The fact that Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy was cheating the people of Visakhapatnam by projecting the port city as the executive capital was evident from the posting of a message by the YSRCP on the social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) on August 12 that the State Secretariat was being constructed at Rushikonda and its deletion a short while later.
The Chief Minister would have submitted a proposal to the Central government for shifting the High Court to Kurnool if he was serious about it but he confined it to the rhetoric for obvious reasons, and the R-5 zone in Amaravati was only a ploy to divide the people on the lines of religion and caste. People should, therefore, think whether the YSRCP deserved to be re-elected in 2024 in spite of committing grave mistakes, said Mr. Lokesh.
Addressing an impressive gathering of Amaravati farmers at Tadikonda in Guntur district as part of his Yuva Galam padayatra on August 13 (Sunday), Mr. Lokesh said that Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy had raised the Jai Amaravati slogan along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the then Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu but took an about-turn for political reasons, and it was for the development of Amaravati as the capital that 29,000 farmers gave their multi-cropped lands.
He pointed out that the then TDP government had got major private companies to set up their manufacturing units in Anantapur, Chittoor, Nellore and other districts. The focus was on the development of Amaravati as the seat of the government. “The present government has ruined the capital and it would not admit that the three capitals was a mistake,” he said.
The TDP leader further said that his party had predicted that the Amaravati project would be obliterated if the YSRCP came to power and, unfortunately, it became a reality. He insisted that the TDP had a vision for the State duly including the capital city, which would be given a tangible shape if people voted for it in 2024 elections.
Tadikonda MLA Vundavalli Sridevi, who was in the eye of a storm over the alleged cross-voting in the recent MLC elections, said she felt suffocated in the YSRCP as she could neither come out to openly support the cause of Amaravati farmers nor defy the party line on the capital issue. “However, I was clear right from Day One that what the YSRCP was doing in the name of three capitals was detrimental to the large number of Amaravati farmers,” she said.
