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ANDHRA PRADESH |
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CBI seeks permission to conduct Narco test on Jaganmohan Reddy
Political scenario hots up as 18 Assembly seats and 1 LS seat go to polls on Tuesday
TS Sudhir
Hyderabad
After seven days of interrogating Y S Jaganmohan Reddy, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on Monday 11 June, arrived at the Special CBI court with a plea. That it be given permission to carry out a Brain Electrical Activity Profile Test and Narcoanalysis test on Jagan. The agency has made this request because it claims Jagan is not cooperating and giving evasive replies to pointed questions. It had arrested him on May 27, citing pretty much the same reason.
Jagan retorted with a political missile. He objected, in writing, to the van in which he was brought to the court. Pointing out the van is used for regular criminals, he accused the government and the authorities of trying to “deliberately humiliate” him and not taking cognisance of his “special status as a prisoner” and his “stature as a Member of Parliament”. His threat to go on a “fast unto death” worked with the court ordering the CBI to take adequate security precautions for Jagan, who is otherwise provided Z-category security.
“I have today travelled by the van by swallowing my self-respect and pride and at the risk of personal safety only to attend before your honour and seek justice,” he said. This could well have been a speech made on his campaign trail. It is obvious Jagan's eyes are only on what happens in the world outside Chanchalguda central prison, in the one Lok Sabha seat and 18 Assembly seats that go to polls on Tuesday 12 June. The gameplan is already on the drawing board. Sources in the YSR Congress party are boasting that political journalists need to watch out for the tsunami that will hit the Congress on the evening of June 12, once voting ends. They are clearly hoping that the Congress MLAs will desert the sinking ship.
Poll watchers say that that the writing is on the wall. YSR Congress, barring a tight contest in three Assembly seats, looks set to sweep the polls in the 17 seats in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions. Chandrababu Naidu, when asked how many seats he predicted his party would win, refused to guess. A clear indicator of the deflated mood in the bicycle party. The Congress despite putting up a united front during the campaign period, looks set to prove the old adage `United we stand' wrong. The Congress, thanks to its refusal to take a decision on Telangana has lost significant ground in the region, any losses in the other two regions will hurt.
The immediate fear is what happens to the Kiran Kumar Reddy government. If the Congress indeed fares as miserably as reports suggest, the knives would be out for the Chief Minister. While one camp in the YSR Congress is in favour of bargaining with the powers-that-be for a reprieve for Jagan in lieu of letting the state government survive, another school of thought is to go for the kill and force mid-term polls.
A week is a long time in politics and the remaining part of this week promises to be both long and a turning point in Andhra Pradesh's politics.
TS Sudhir is an independent journalist based in Hyderabad.
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