Telangana Chief Minister and TRS President K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Sunday embarked on a mission to form a Federal Front, halting at the port city of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh to offer prayers at a temple and seek blessings of a seer.
KCR and his family members left Hyderabad in a special aircraft, and after landing at Visakhapatnam Airport, they drove to Sharada Peetham. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief and his family members performed special prayers at Rajasyamala Temple. They later took the blessings of Swami Swarupanandendra.
Known to be deeply superstitious, this is nothing new to the Telangana Chief Minister. Ahead of the elections, KCR and his family performed the Raja Shyamala Chandi Homam, and Chandi Sahitha Rudra Homam before the election at his farmhouse in Erravalli in Siddipet district.
Before filing his nomination for the December 7 Assembly polls, KCR visited the Lord Venkateshwara temple at Koinapally in Siddipet district and performed a pooja, a ritual he has been following since 1983. In 2015, he performed ‘Ayutha Chandi Maha Yagnam’ for which Rs 15 crore was spent, due to Telangana’s drought and scanty rainfall, even as the state was plagued by farmer suicides.
KCR will leave for Bhubaneswar on Sunday evening and call on Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. After a night halt in the Odisha capital, KCR will visit the Konark Temple and Jagannadha Temple on Monday and later leave for Kolkata, where he will call on his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee.
After a meeting with Mamata Banerjee, the Telangana Chief Minister will visit the Kalimata Temple. Subsequently, he will leave for New Delhi, where he will have separate meetings with former Uttar Pradesh chief ministers Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav.
During his two to three day stay in the national capital, the TRS chief will make a courtesy call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He will have meetings with some central ministers and discuss state related issues.
KCR, who led TRS to a landslide victory in Assembly elections in December, has announced that he will focus on national politics to work for cobbling up an alternative to both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress.
After the electoral victory on December 11, he had stated that a consortium of regional parties may emerge soon. The TRS chief, who plans to visit various states, has hired the special aircraft for one month.
“We have the responsibility to make our presence felt in national politics. The intellect of Telangana must be used for the good of India. We are going to play a very crucial role in national politics. We are going to show and give a new definition to the national political situation. There is confusion at the national political level and this needs to change. Unless it changes, the country will not grow. A non-Congress and non-BJP government must be instituted. Today, I am proud to say that Telangana stands as a non-Congress, non-BJP state,” he had said.
IANS inputs