State BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar, on Sunday, castigated Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao for ‘failing’ to fulfil his promise of erecting a 125-foot statue of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in Hyderabad even after six years.
After inspecting the works of the proposed Ambedkar Memorial near NTR Ghat along with other party leaders, he told reporters that it was on April 14, 2016, that KCR had announced installation of the statue in the heart of the capital claiming to be the ‘first of its kind in the country”.
“The CM also announced he would unveil the statue by Ambedkar Jayanti exactly a year later, in 2017. But he completely turned a blind eye towards the work and had never bothered to attend Ambedkar’s birth and death anniversary programmes,” he charged. Mr. Sanjay claimed that “pressures from BJP along with various Dalit and other people’s organisations forced the government to release ₹146 crore on September 17, 2020”.
He questioned the delay when the “palatial Pragati Bhavan could be built within a year” and “₹800 crore public money is wasted for construction of a new Secretariat complex”. “The progress of new Secretariat works was reviewed by the CM himself, who visited the site five times. Why hasn’t he shown the same interest towards Ambedkar statue?,” he asked.
KCR had been ‘cheating’ Dalits from day one of taking over as the CM. “Before elections, he had promised to make a Dalit the first Chief Minister of Telangana, but soon after winning the elections, he backtracked on his promise,” he alleged.
Describing KCR as an “embodiment of opportunism”, he said the latest comment on redrafing the Constitution was another example of his (CM’s) frequently shifting stances but “he won’t be able to touch even a single page in the Constitution”.
