PM's poll speech below the level of Sarpanch: Telangana CM

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao on Tuesday said that he had no desire to become the Prime Minister. Alleging that the Prime Minister did not speak the truth about the allocation of funds to the state, Rao asked Modi to apologise to the people.

Hyderabad: In a scathing attack on the Prime Minister, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao accused him of lying on central allocation to the state and said his campaign speech was "below the level of sarpanch".

Addressing an election rally, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi(TRS) President said that he wants to see a non-Congress, non-BJP government at the Centre to address the real problems of the country which both the national parties have failed to solve in last 70 years.

KCR, as Rao is widely known, said he would like to contribute to bringing a qualitative change in national politics.

Urging people to elect 16 Lok Sabha candidates of TRS (leaving Hyderabad for its ally MIM), he said only TRS can work to safeguard the state's interests and the state's rights.

KCR demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should apologize to the people of Telangana for speaking lies.

He was referring to Modi's claims at a BJP rally in Hyderabad on Monday that the Centre had given Rs 35,000 crore to Telangana for various projects.

The TRS chief dared Modi to prove this.

He said Telangana was contributing Rs 1 lac crore to the Centre's share in taxes every year while the Centre was giving only Rs 24,000 crore to the state. "The state is giving you Rs 76,000 crore," he said.

KCR took exception to Modi’s personal remarks about him and said the Prime Minister had stooped to the level of a village sarpanch.

He said both the BJP and the Congress hurl accusations at each other to divert the nation’s attention from their failures and also the real issues like poverty, unemployment and remunerative prices for farmers.

“One says PM ‘chor hai’ and the other says ‘maa-beta zamanat pe hai’. Do people want this?” he asked.