Something is cooking on Modi-KCR front

Telangana Chief Minister and TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) had a detailed meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Friday. Sources say that KCR “explained” his concept of the federal front to the Prime Minister ahead of the general elections. This was the first meeting of the Chief Minister with the Prime Minister in seven months after the Global Entrepreneurship Summit here in November 2017.

This was also their first meeting after KCR floated his federal front plans and met some non-Congress and non-BJP leaders. According to those who accompanied KCR to the PM’s meeting in Delhi, both leaders had cordial and elaborate talks on a range of issues, mostly concerning the state. The CM submitted as many as 10 memorandums to the PM, seeking his intervention. They met for an hour from 12.30 pm.

Though this meeting was billed as a purely official visit by the CM, sources said that the leaders discussed about the political situation in the country, especially in the wake of regional parties trying to regroup as an alternative at the Centre.

The meeting assumes significance as minutes after the CM left the Prime Minister’s Office, Telangana Governor E. S. L. Narasimhan, too, called on PM Modi and discussed the present political situation in both the Telugu speaking states—Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Narasimhan later told the media in New Delhi that his meeting had nothing to do with KCR’s meeting with the PM.

However, there appears to have been a convergence of agendas at both the meetings in view of the growing distance between Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and the BJP, particularly in Andhra. Several leaders from the BJP and Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress in Andhra are demanding CBI probes against AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu