TRS MPs to resign today

Stepping up pressure to carve out a separate Telangana state, members of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) are set to resign from the Lok Sabha on Monday. Sources said TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao will first demand that Speaker Somnath Chatterjee suspend question hour and take up an adjournment motion for a discussion on the issue. If his notice is rejected, he and his three party colleagues — Ravinder Naik, B Vinod Kumar and T Madhusudan Reddy — will announce their resignations from the Lok Sabha. The party has lined up a string of meetings to follow up the action in Parliament.

A resignation from either of the two Houses has to be in accordance to a well-laid format. A conditional resignation meets with rejection. Therefore, several members — including Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee — have had the benefit of both free publicity for “resignation” and its inevitable rejection. It remains to be seen whether the TRS resignations will turn out to be a mere publicity stunt or not.

Rao had resigned as a Union minister last August after he failed to get a firm commitment on Telangana from the UPA Government. The TRS MPs had disrupted the Presidential address to the joint session of Parliament on February 25, by repeatedly shouting “Jai Telangana” even as President Pratibha Patil read her speech.