The 'Pragati Nivedana Sabha' conducted by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi with lakhs of people mobilised from all corners of Telangana turned out to be a big disappointment for the people and also independent political observers.
If it was just for a show of strength, then the TRS meeting can be considered successful at least to some extent.
Though the party claimed that there would be more than 25 lakh people at the public meeting, it finally ended up with one-fourth of the expected crowds. In any case, it was one of the biggest meetings ever held by the TRS, if not the biggest.
But what disappointed the people was the speech of party president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
The party leaders including his son K T Rama Rao and daughter K Kavitha told the media that he would speak for one and a half hours to two hours. But, he spoke just for 48 minutes and most of it was recalling the past.
He read out quickly the schemes and programmes initiated by his government in the last four years without going deep into them.
Instead, he said the party leaders have distributed pamphlets at the venue and also circulated handouts to the media explaining the schemes launched by his government from the 2014 TRS manifesto and also those which were not mentioned in the manifesto.
“The programmes are there for you all to see and you are experiencing the benefits. I don’t want blow my own trumpet on that,” he said.
That is surprising. The meeting itself was called Pragati Nivedana Sabha, but he hardly presented any progress report. For that matter, the speech was more or less his address to the gathering at the Independence Day parade.
If distribution of pamphlets is the intention of holding a public meeting, why should the party waste so much money? It can as well distribute pamphlets at the village level at a minimal cost!
There were no fireworks and no aggression in his speech.
“People come to KCR’s meetings only to listen to his speeches which are witty, punchy and pungent. But this time, his speech was completely lack-lustre,” a TRS leader said.
