As there are frequent media reports claiming that the Congress high command might replace Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy and AP Congress Committee president Botcha Satyanarayana, the party has ruled out any such possibility.
“Sometime back the high command has said that no changes are stipulated in Andhra Pradesh...... We stand by that,” said Congress spokesman and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s son Sandeep Dikshit here on Monday.
Mr. Dikshit, who is a Lok Sabha member from the capital, was reacting to journalists’ query on the note reportedly written to Congress president Sonia Gandhi by Union Tribal Affairs Minister and Araku MP Kishore Chandra Deo making a scathing attack on the Chief Minister and the APCC president. The report claimed that the Minister wanted both of them to be replaced.
The Congress spokesman replied in the negative when asked whether the party would take disciplinary action against Mr. Deo. Though the news about the note, allegedly written by Mr. Deo, was carried by an English daily, the Minister, denied having written such a note.
“I have not written any letter either to the Congress high command or Ms. Sonia Gandhi. No note has gone to the high command from me in the last four or five months. Since I am in Delhi, I go and tell them what is necessary. You have to ask the person who has written where this letter has come from. I have nothing to do with it. I have not sent any note in the last four or five months,” Mr. Deo told journalists here.
Not his job
To a question, he said it was for the high command to decide if a change in leadership was necessary in Andhra Pradesh and that it was not his job to go into that. “My job is to look after my ministry,” the Minister said.
He reiterated that bauxite mining in north coastal Andhra Pradesh (comprising Srikakulam, Vizianagaram and Visakhapatnam districts) had stopped.
