Minister for North East development wants to see 2BHKs in Telangana when Manipur burns

BJP State president G Kishan Reddy was stopped by the police while heading towards Batasingaram village for an ‘inspection’.

Hyderabad: Even as the entire country was outraged and in a state of shock over the Manipur incident, union Minister G Kishan Reddy, whose portfolio includes development of North East States, remained silent on the issue, and instead, was trying to inspect double bedroom houses being constructed at Batasingaram here.

Showing his desperation for some action after being appointed president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s State unit, Kishan Reddy, who is still officially a union Minister, stood away from the uproar in the Parliament over the Manipur strife, and instead led a BJP delegation along with BJP MLA M Raghunandan Rao to Batasingaram. His insistence, even when the police stopped the delegation, saw mild tension prevailing for a while near the Shamshabad airport, following which the police had to take the BJP activists including Kishan Reddy into custody.

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Kishan Reddy, who claimed that the Centre had sanctioned 2.5 lakh houses to the State under the PM Awas Yojana, alleged the State government was neglecting construction of these houses. He later dashed off a letter to President Droupadi Murmu and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla asking them to intervene in the matter and take necessary action.

Interestingly, in the letter, Kishan Reddy said it was his duty as a union Minister representing the Central government and as a Lok Sabha Member from Telangana, to regularly monitor the progress of various central schemes and that it was in this regard that he had planned a visit to Batasingaram.

“As a ‘Z Category Security’ holder and due to the elevated threat perception against me, I had published my tour programme on Wednesday itself and a copy was also sent to the Director General of Police. Still the police detained me,” he said.

BJP National general secretary and party Telangana Affairs in-charge Tarun Chugh also jumped into support Kishan Reddy, accusing the Telangana government of “throttling democracy”. Chugh, obviously oblivious to the fact that Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao had recently inaugurated Asia’s largest government housing project at Kollur apart from the State handing over several thousands of houses to beneficiaries across the State, alleged that the Chief Minister had not kept his promise of providing double bedroom houses in the State in the last nine years.