Damodar Rajanarasimha: New Dy. CM of AP
posted on Jun 10, 2011 @ 6:56PM
Damodar Rajanarasimha has been appointed the new Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh by the Congress. He is currently the state's higher education minister and took additional charge of agriculture, after YSR's brother Vivekananda Reddy quit as Minister.
Mr Damodar Rajanarsimha is from the Telangana region which is undergoing a huge turmoil of separatist movement. Though the central goverrnment has initially assured that Andhra Pradesh would be bifurcated to create a new Telangana state, it later backtracked because of protests from various regions in the state. Politicians across different parties from Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema objected to the division. Telangana campaigners continue to press for their own state. Earlier today, Congress MPs met the Prime Minister in Delhi and demanded that the party must make its stand clear on the future of their region. Otherwise their position politically becomes untenable.
The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Kiran Kumar Reddy, is from Rayalaseema. The Congress has been trying to appease Telangana by giving its representatives key positions. However, Mr Rajanarasimha has not been among those who are aggressively fighting the party for a Telangana state. He belongs to the scheduled caste.