Bhatti Vikramarka after being elected as the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader and by virtue of it is all set to gain the status of Leader of the Opposition in Telangana Assembly, but in the process he will create a history of sorts as the first Dalit to have occupied the position not just in Telangana but also in the combined Andhra Pradesh.
In the combined State there was just one Dalit CLP leader, Damodaram Sanjeevaiah but he was the Chief Minister and not the Leader of the Opposition. So Mr. Vikramarka will go into the record books as the first Dalit LoP of the Telugu States.
The position, which was served with aplomb by senior leaders like N.T. Rama Rao, N. Chandrababu Naidu, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, P. Janardhan Reddy and K. Jana Reddy in the last 25 years, is going to a leader from the Dalit community. Though most of the times it were upper caste leaders who held the post, there were two Backward Classes leaders too.
While Gouthu Lachanna was the LoP in 1978 as a representative of the Janata Party, C. Madanmohan of the Congress was the LoP from 1983-85 when Mr. N.T. Rama Rao was the Chief Minister. Interestingly, another Dalit leader, K. Vijayarama Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) was elected as the leader of the TRS Legislature Party (TRSLP) but he didn’t get the LoP status as the Telugu Desham Party (TDP) had more numbers.
In the combined State, political parties had to win 30 seats to claim the LoP status but the number is now reduced to 12 as the Telangana Assembly has 119 members. Leader of a party that gets 10% of the total Assembly seats will automatically get the LoP status.
Senior leaders recall that even the Communist parties in their hay days too could not get the status as the required number in the combined State was 30. After the emergence of Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the numbers of Communist parties continued to dwindle and they further fell with another regional party TRS storming into the political space.
Speaking to The Hindu , Mr. Vikramarka said it is not just a satisfying recognition but also a great responsibility put on him and thanked AICC president Rahul Gandhi for giving such a strength to the Dalit community leaders.
