A day after retired IPS officer Dr R S Praveen Kumar joined the Bahujan Samaj Party with a lot of fanfare at a public meeting in Nalgonda and vowed to pull down the K Chandrasekhar Rao government, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi dismissed his entry into politics as an insignificant development.
“Praveen Kumar is not the first bureaucrat to enter politics. In the past, too, senior IAS officer Jayaprakash Narayan launched Lok Satta Party and retired IPS officer and former CBI joint director V V Lakshminarayana contested elections on Jana Sena Party ticket. What happened to them? Praveen Kumar will also meet the same fate,” TRS legislator Gadari Kishore Kumar said.
Another TRS legislator N Bhaskar Rao pointed out that a Swaero member contested the recent by-elections to Nagarjunasagar assembly seat with the support of Praveen Kumar.
“But he got just 3,000 votes and lost his deposit,” he reminded.
Reacting strongly to the retired IPS officer’s assertion that he would go to Pragathi Bhavan riding on an elephant, the TRS leaders ridiculed him saying one can enter Pragati Bhavan only in a car.
“Any election conducted in Telangana, it is the TRS which will emerge victorious,” they asserted.
Accusing Praveen Kumar of crushing the Telangana students in Osmania University during the movement for separate state, the TRS leaders sought to know with what face he would ask for votes of Telangana people to come to power.
The TRS leaders said Praveen Kumar had taken the voluntary retirement from service only because of the threatening from the Bharatiya Janata Party.
“In his entire speech in Nalgonda meeting, he did not utter a word against the BJP, as he is afraid of the party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” they said.
They alleged that Praveen Kumar had become a pawn in the hands of the BJP, which was trying to destabilise the strong regional parties in the states.
“It has become a fashion for everybody to criticise KCR. He should not dance to the tunes of the BJP,” the TRS leaders added.
