Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s unusual gesture on Thursday when he stopped his convoy to attend to an old Muslim pensioner at Tolichowki in Hyderabad was the frontpage news for all the Telugu media on Friday.
KCR got down from the car, spoke to the old man, who was injured in a building collapse incident and was unable to meet his both ends meet and instructed the officials to resolve his grievance.
Within hours, all the problems of the old man were attended to by the officials and it evoked huge response from the people. It was the news of the day for the media.
However, Bharatiya Janata Party is suspecting that the entire episode was just stage-managed.
“It was a well-scripted drama for KCR’s theatrics enacted with a singular objective of ensuring minority votes in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections,” BJP official spokesman K Krishna Sagar Rao said.
He said the chief minister had enacted a C-grade script produced and directed by himself personally, in a desperate attempt to over-appease the Muslim voters in the city.
Since KCR assumed charge as the chief minister, he has not been accessible even to his council of ministers, MLAs, party leaders and opposition leaders, leave alone the common people.
“How did he suddenly become so empathetic to an old Muslim man on the street, especially while he was in a high-speed convoy?” Rao asked.
He wondered what had happened to KCR's empathy when over 57 pilgrims died in an unprecedented accident at Kondagattu a couple of years ago and more recently, when over 30 Hindu homes and 50 vehicles were burnt down by an unruly rioting mob led by MIM leaders at Bhainsa.
“His selective empathy to Muslims and especially before any election season has become a shameless consistent pattern. Tolichowki drama exposes the lowest level of political and communal pandering practiced by KCR and TRS,” he criticised.