• Congress accuses KCR of lying during Iftar time for political gains

Hyderabad, April 30, 2022: Former Minister & ex-Leader of Opposition in Telangana Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir has strongly condemned Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao for not making any announcement about the loans or jobs for minority youth during the Iftar party hosted by the State Government at LB Stadium on Friday night.

“CM KCR did not speak about the implementation of promised 12% Muslim reservation, giving jobs and loans to minority youth, housing facility, the release of Fee Reimbursement and scholarships for minority students or any other electoral promise made by him in the last eight years. He did not even specify the deadline by which all vacant nominated posts in the minority-related corporations will be filled. Iftar time is a pious moment for the Muslims and he used it to make false claims and instill fear among the minorities,” Shabbir Ali said in a media statement on Saturday.

“Minorities voted for the TRS party in previous elections with the expectation that KCR would honour his promises. Earlier, KCR cheated Muslims with fake promises and false claims. Now he wants them to support TRS out of fear of BJP,” he alleged.

Advising KCR and other TRS leaders to read a few relevant history books, Shabbir Ali said Hyderabad has been a peaceful city for more than 400 years. “Hyderabad is known for its Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb long before KCR was even born. Except for a few incidents of communal riots, the history of Hyderabad has remained clean from the blots of communalism. All 16 Chief Ministers who ruled from Hyderabad had hosted Iftar parties during the holy month of Ramzan. Therefore, by hosting an Iftar dinner for Muslims, KCR should not assume that he is the only ‘secular’ CM in the entire history,” he said.

Shabbir Ali said Muslims, especially the youth, had a lot of expectations from the Chief Minister’s speech during the Iftar party. He said that the Telangana State Minorities Finance Corporation had received nearly 1.53 Lakh loan applications for the first and last time in the year 2015-16. None of those applications was approved and so far, not a single Muslim youth got a single rupee as a loan under the TRS regime. Since KCR has been claiming that the economy has revived and Telangana has become the richest State in the country, the minority youth were expecting that CM KCR would announce non-refundable grants of at least Rs. 1 lakh each for at least 5 lakh jobless youth of minority communities in Telangana. However, he did not announce a single rupee benefit for the community during the Iftar party, he said.

The Congress leader reminded that when KCR hosted the first Iftar dinner as the Chief Minister in 2014, he announced that a 12% Muslim quota would be implemented by the next Ramzan (2015). Next year, he repeated the promises by changing the year. Later on, he stopped mentioning anything about 12% Muslim reservation. “Following its inclination towards RSS and BJP, KCR Govt demolished six mosques across the State, deprived representation to minorities in important bodies like the TSPSC and partially stopped the release of funds for various welfare schemes. This was done on an experimental basis to check whether the minority community can be controlled by bribing a few political and religious leaders. The KCR’s formula worked and the so-called ‘top political and religious Muslims leaders’ felt honoured in eating the Khajoor (date) from the hands of the same KCR who signed the order for demolitions of six mosques,” he said while appealing to the Islamic clerics to do a serious introspection on their behaviour.

Shabbir Ali also reminded us that KCR helped BJP in winning over 40 seats in the last GHMC elections by using the same rhetoric of ‘Hyderabad is safe’. He said CM KCR would be proven insane if he tries to use the same trick again in the next Assembly elections. He said that the Congress party would never allow TRS, BJP or MIM to polarise the elections. The Congress party would highlight the failures of the TRS Govt in Telangana and the BJP Govt at the Centre. Both TRS and BJP are equally responsible for the pathetic conditions of people and rising inflation in the country. However, both the parties are shamelessly trying to gain mileage by indulging in a blame game, he alleged

“All claims of development by PM Modi and CM KCR are false. While Modi Govt is trying to survive by selling the national assets created by the previous Congress regimes, CM KCR is running the government on loans secured on high interest. Their financial misadventures are bound to spoil the lives and careers of crores of young Indians in the coming years. To hide the failures of their corrupt regimes, both BJP and TRS, in secret alliance with the MIM, are trying to play the ‘Hindu-Muslim’ card,” he alleged.

The Congress leader announced that the Congress party would soon come up with a ‘Status Report’ on the condition of Muslims under the TRS regime from 2014 to 2022. The report will also contain comparative figures of spending on minorities’ welfare and other schemes by different regimes in the country, he said.