The Telangana government is unlikely to officially celebrate the Hyderabad Liberation Day on Wednesday though Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had waxed eloquent about the significance of the day in the past and the party had also observed the event every year since its inception.
With just a day left for the event, officials in the Culture Department said they have not received any proposals from the government and there was no way they could be processed at short notice on Tuesday because it involved clearance by Finance Department.
Mr. Rao was said to have ruled out conceding the demand of official celebrations when a delegation of BJP led by MP Bandaru Dattatreya called on him at the Secretariat on Monday . He reportedly drew a parallel between the definition given to the day by the BJP, Communists and nationalists and closed the issue. While the BJP termed it liberation from the tyranny of Nizam, the Communists said it was betrayal because it marked return of feudal lords to villages from where they were driven out as part of a rebellion against them and the nationalists maintained it was merger with the Indian union.
The BJP, which was in the forefront of the demand for official celebration for several years, had always accused the parties in power that they were trying to appease minorities in not observing the day. They cited official patronage given by Maharashtra and Karnataka governments which got Marathi and Kannada speaking areas respectively from the erstwhile Hyderabad State on September 17, 1948.
The CPI had been observing a weeklong celebration from September 11 when the call for an armed struggle was given in 1947 to September 17, marking the merger.
In the absence of a positive response from the Chief Minister, the BJP has planned to organise the celebrations at Golconda fort where the Independence Day fete of the government took place and other centres in Telangana. Sources in TRS also said the flag hoisting would take place as usual at the party office.
