NETA NATTER | G.V.L. NARASIMHA RAO DANCES TO PUBLIC’S TUNE?

It’s not always easy being in the public eye. The journey to the top can be arduous and it is not uncommon to see political leaders frying fritters, giving a bath to a child and so on during election campaigns but, the other day, BJP Rajya Sabha member G.V.L. Narasimha Rao’s actions left several wondering what he was up to. During the Sankranti celebrations in Vizag, Narasimha Rao rode a rickshaw with some visible discomfort and difficulty, joined a Kolatam dance, among other activities. Is GVL trying to make his presence felt in Vizag and pitching himself as the party candidate from Vizag for the coming Lok Sabha polls was the question that quickly did the rounds. After all, in the last polls, the BJP got a mere 2.73 per cent of votes in the Visakhapatnam seat, that was just 1.39 per cent more than what NOTA received.

TELANGANA’S TIGERS IN DANGER?

All of a sudden, top officials of the Telangana state forest department are beginning to feel hunted, giving them a taste of what wild animals in the state’s forest, that they have sworn to protect, possibly feel like. Two tigers and a leopard died in one week in this New Year, while a few more tigers have gone missing in the state. Though some scapegoats have been found and suspended, and not without good enough reasons, the questions doing the rounds among the ranks in the department is what were the top bosses doing when field officials were not doing their jobs, or if they are still not able to shake off the government-doesn’t-care-about-wildlife attitude that pervaded the department in the BRS regime, and whether they still believe that the Congress government will be happy counting Haritha Haram trees. Incidentally, a little birdie chirped that the new forest minister Konda Surekha is yet to receive a briefing on what is happening with the tigers in crisis in Telangana state.

KALESHWARAM — A RIGHT ROYAL MESS

The Kaleshwaram lift irrigation scheme (Klis), according to the Congress, is a mega scam. The project has been in the eye of a storm for long — more recently, some piers at its Medigadda barrage couldn’t bear the weight of water and sank into the soft sand of the Godavari River. Though the CAG had made it clear that the mega engineering firm involved in Klis’ construction benefited by thousands of crores of rupees, the Congress government has been saying that its promised investigation will reach its logical conclusion. So far, there has been no official word on the probes and, amidst this uncertainty, comes the news that the mega top honchos are trying their best to meet top powers in Delhi, fuelling speculation that a “compromise formula” might soon be on the cards to bail the contractor from the Kaleshwaram mess.

LEGACY OF JAIPAL REDDY MAKES A COMEBACK

Former Union minister and respected Congress leader, the late S. Jaipal Reddy, was remembered on January 16, his birth anniversary. Party leaders who were not too keen, or simply did not care to remember their leader, queued up this year to pay tribute, leaving flowers at Jaipal Reddy’s memorial on PVNR Marg in Hyderabad. Joining them in droves were government officials who could not care in the past about Jaipal Reddy, who passed away in 2019. But this year, it was different. After all, the Chief Minister is married to Jaipal Reddy’s niece. The state government also issued a GO to observe the birth and death anniversary of Jaipal Reddy in a befitting manner, and what followed was glowing tributes to the late leader, including recalling his role in sanctioning the Hyderabad Metro Rail project when he was Union minister for urban affairs.

KTR AND HIS CROWN OF THORNS

Defeat is a hard pill to swallow and trying to justify such an outcome usually ends up making a person resort to desperate efforts to appear logical. Such appears to be the case with BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao who has been trying hard to whip up some much-needed energy into his party’s rank and file after the humiliating loss in the Assembly elections. During the election campaign, KTR was hell-bent on painting the Congress in a bad light — as was the instance of a letter from the Karnataka government purportedly seeking to “steal” the Foxconn’s unit from Hyderabad to Bengaluru. Nowadays, he has been busy telling his party folks that the vote share difference between the Congress and the BRS was not much, hinting that for all practical purposes the BRS was not defeated but lost narrowly. For someone who has a way with words, the sentence of defeat in the polls appears to hang hard on him. After all, he is the working president of the BRS and right now, that is a crown full of thorns to wear.