The third point in her offer was the most crucial one and the closest
she ever came to agreeing to the bifurcation of the state. However, Chenna
Reddy was not interested in something that would happen five years down the
road, but was interested in immediate results.
Chenna Reddy came back to Hyderabad and presented the PM’s proposal to
his party. TPS members overwhelmingly rejected Indira Gandhi’s offer. As a result, a
contest between the TPS and Congress in the region then became inevitable.
The decision to run against the Congress party probably was the worst
political blunder Chenna Reddy committed during the separate Telangana
movement. He was haughty with his successes in the by-election and thought
that he could arm-twist Mrs. Gandhi by winning the elections in Telangana
by a landslide. He certainly got the landslide, but he terribly miscalculated the
leverage such a win would give him when negotiating with Mrs. Gandhi.
In the run-up to the elections, CM Brahmananda Reddy announced
more sops to win over the Nizam Telangana voter. He announced that the
Kothagudem power plant would become operational in March 1972 and
started construction of another plant in Ramagundam. He announced plans
to provide electricity to 1000 villages a year in the state—600 in the Telangana
region, 200 in Rayalaseema, and 200 in the Coastal Andhra region.
None of the sops announced by the CM affected the Nizam Telangana voter.
TPS won 10 of the 14 Parliament seats it contested in the mid-term elections.
Two months passed after the elections. Chenna Reddy did not get the
recognition he was hoping to get. It gradually dawned on TPS politicians that
they had been victorious electorally but defeated politically.
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