New Delhi:
Hours before the Congress announced that Telangana will be India's 29th state, Sonia Gandhi met a group of legislators and MPs from Andhra Pradesh who are against bifurcating the state and informed them that there was no going back on the decision this time.
She also told her party leaders that they must impress upon the people of the state that there would now be faster development in both regions as the uncertainty of whether there would be a new Telangana state had been removed.
After Mrs Gandhi decided recently that the Congress' promise on Telangana must be met, the party's top leaders had called up all 19 Congress MPs from the non-Telangana regions of Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema, to placate and prepare them.
The Congress' formula for the new state is the inclusion of 10 districts of Andhra Pradesh and the city of Hyderabad as a common capital for the two states for 10 years, after which it will be part of Telangana. But the party is still reportedly open to including two districts from the southern region of Rayalaseema in the new Telangana state.
Sources said today that the ruling party favours such a plan because it would divide Parliamentary and Assembly seats equally between the two states - each would get 21 Parliamentary seats and 147 assembly seats.
The general elections, now only months away, were a major consideration in the Congress's timing of the Telangana sanction and the party believes that including the two districts in the new state would split the area of influence of political rivals Jagan Reddy's YSR Congress and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which have a strong presence in these districts and in the Seemandhra region as a whole. Some Congressmen have voiced the worry that after the split, the party might flounder in coastal Andhra.
The ruling party also reportedly calculates that these two districts would be able to share irrigation water from Telangana with the arid Seemandhra region, winning crucial farmer support for the party.