It's quite ironical that KCR has preferred to ignore students, youth and unemployed, who spearheaded Telangana statehood agitation, sacrificed their career and lives, faced police lathis and cases for the cause of achieving statehood for Telangana.
Everyone agrees that Telangana State was the result of sacrifices made by students and the next phase of Telangana agitation reaching its peak in 2009 was because of students of Osmania and other universities revolting against the then Congress governments at the Centre and State.
Realising this, KCR too promised to provide one lakh jobs to youth in 2014 TRS manifesto, which played a key role in TRS coming to power and KCR becoming first CM of Telangana State.
However, after coming to power, KCR threw this promise to the winds which has led to severe resentment among youth.
Students, youth and unemployed have been on the warpath against theTRS government for the past four years for its failure to fill the vacancies in government departments as promised.
The youth which rallied behind TRS during theTelangana agitation has now totally distanced itself from it.
KCR too seems to have realised that it's not possible to garner votes of students, youth and unemployed in 2018 elections.
The TRS manifesto released by KCR on Sunday gave clear hints that he wants to woo existing government employees for votes by promising to increase their retirement age from 58 years to 61.
Surprisingly, there was no demand from any employees association to increase retirement age to 61. They have only been requesting for the limit to be raised to 60 years as was done in AP by the TDP government.
Strangely, KCR has been opposing increase in retirement age to 60 years for the last four years on the grounds that it will deprive students of government jobs.
Now the same KCR has promised to increase age limit to 61 years, though there was no demand from anyone for this.
This clearly proves that KCR opted for employees over youth believing that youth anyway would not vote for TRS and that TRS may derive some advantage if employees are benefitted as they play a key role in conducting elections and may help TRS during polling to the maximum extent possible.