Karimnagar: Y.S. Sharmila — who launched the YSR Telangana Party (YSRTP) last year without support from her brother, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy — has said that his support doesn’t matter and that she’s aiming to get her party to contest all 119 seats in the 2023 Telangana assembly election.
In an exclusive interview with ThePrint, Sharmila asserted that the YSRTP would emerge as the chief contender to the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in 2023. It will contest with no alliance in the state.
Sharmila has said that she launched the YSRTP with the sole aim of bringing back the legacy and governance of her late father, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, a former chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh.
“Many ruled me out in the beginning, (saying) that YSR is a long-gone era and he is no longer prevalent in Telangana, but I received a lot of warmth and love during the padayatra. Being YSR’s daughter will just be a launchpad for me; people will actually see my calibre,” she said.
Sharmila has been on padayatra (walkathon) in Telangana since October last year. So far, she has walked 3,300 km and covered 64 constituencies in the state. She added, “I can say, ever since we started the padayatra, (the) YSRTP’s visibility graph has gone up in the state.”
However, beyond Sharmila, the party barely has any recognisable faces as it attempts to carve out a space for itself in Telangana’s crowded political field, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the TRS have become arch-rivals and the Congress is grappling to save its position.
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Divided house of YSR?
Asked about her brother’s support for her political journey, Sharmila emphasised “how much” she had helped him, but added that this hadn’t been reciprocated.
“It (Jagan’s support) doesn’t matter. Now, the help we give somebody doesn’t necessarily mean they will reciprocate. You do what you want to do based on your judgement, and what the other person does is completely up to him. I am not going to be conditional about it,” she said.
When her brother was in jail in 2013 over corruption charges, Sharmila held a padayatra in Andhra Pradesh, campaigning for the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), which Jagan had formed — breaking away from the Congress — after their father’s sudden death in 2009. She also campaigned for him during the 2019 assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh.
However, Sharmila wasn’t included in Jagan’s cabinet. Indeed, she has never contested elections, and the speculation that she would get a Rajya Sabha seat didn’t pan out.
When she launched the YSRTP last year, the Andhra Pradesh government and the YSRCP said there had been “ideological differences” between the siblings, and that she’d formed the party against Jagan’s advice.
Discussing these “differences”, Sharmila said “Everyone has their own priorities. When he is the CM of Andhra, he will always have to take the side of his people. Just because one member of the family is in Telangana, if he takes that person’s side, then it will clash with his priorities — which, for natural reasons, he might not like. But, I don’t have to be bound by them; I have my own life and I have my own region and I have the right to make my own decisions.”
The once-regular family meetings, for festivals and other occasions, have became less frequent, according to sources close to the family.
Sharmila said the last time she met her brother was in July, on their father’s birth anniversary. “We (Jagan and I) met at our father’s birth anniversary, we had dinner together, it was a fine conversation and that was the last time I saw him. That’s it.”
‘Can’t I be on my ‘own’
Reacting to allegations that her party is the BJP’s “B-Team”, Sharmila argued that if that were the case, she would have just joined the BJP or the Congress rather than launching her own party and struggling to establish it in Telangana.
“Can’t I be on my own? If I had any inclination to join any party, would it not have been easier to just join a big political party? Wouldn’t my life have been so much easier had I just joined the Congress or the BJP (in Telangana)? Why would I even launch a political party, to go through all this? It is just ridiculous, I am a ‘Plan B’ to nobody, I don’t work for anybody. Had I been with the BJP or the Congress, would I be able to talk about YSR so much, like I am doing now,” she asked.
Sharmila has been a staunch critic of the ruling TRS, led by Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, popularly referred to as KCR. Last month, she sought a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into Telangana government’s massive Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project, alleging that large-scale corruption had inflated its cost threefold — to 1.2 lakh crore from Rs 40,000 crore. Later, she also filed a complaint about the project with the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).
Although Sharmila’s target is to contest all the assembly seats in 2023 in Telangana, the party did not stand in the high-decibel Munugodu byelection earlier this month.
Sharmila said she chose not to contest the bypoll because it had come about in an “unethical” way and become a “dog fight” between the BJP and the TRS. KCR’s party won the election with a thin margin over the BJP.
Lashing out at the opposition parties in the state, Sharmila said the BJP and the Congress had failed to emerge as alternatives to the TRS. “The politics that the BJP does is either hate politics in the name of religion or defection politics. They catch an MLA who is willing to defect, then they bring (about) a bypoll, spend a lot of money, send their huge BJP force, and try to stir up hype that they are an alternative,” she claimed.
“If the BJP has any integrity, they should commission an inquiry on Kaleshwaram. With what face do they come to our state and say there’s corruption in Kaleshwaram, and yet not commission an inquiry,” she asked.
(Edited by Geethalakshmi Ramanathan)
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