The campaign for separate Telangana snowballed on Tuesday with TRS chief K. Chandrashekar Rao resigning his Lok Sabha seat as the number of MLAs from the region quitting the Andhra Pradesh Assembly went up to 101.
The 101 legislators to put in their papers included 12 ministers of the ruling Congress. 119 of the 294 members of the Andhra Pradesh assembly come from Telangana region.
Concerned over the development, Union Minister and Congress in-charge for Andhra Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party chief Sonia Gandhi and conveyed to them the sentiments of the lawmakers from the Telangana region.
Azad said the MLAs and MPs are ‘open to discussions’ and that the Centre should start discussions on the issue and ‘those who have resigned have not closed their doors.’ Rao, whose Telangana Rashtrya Samithi is spearheading the statehood movement, and his colleague and actor Vijaya Shanti faxed their resignations from Lok Sabha to Speaker Meira Kumar, while two TDP MPs -- Nama Nageswara Rao and Ramesh Rathod -- met her in New Delhi and put in their papers.
101 of the total 119 legislators from the Telangana region have resigned since Monday with more MLAs of Congress, TDP and all 11 legislators of the TRS quitting. Four members of CPI and two from the BJP also resigned from the Assembly.
BJP state president and MLA G Kishan Reddy and his aprty legislator Y. Lakshminarayana submitted their resignation letter late in the evening. With this, the total number of Congress legislators who have resigned has risen to 42, including two from actor Chiranjeevi's Praja Rajyam Party.
All 37 TDP MLAs from the region have resigned. Nine members from Congress, including Deputy Chief Minister Damodar Rajanarashima, seven MIM MLAs and one each from Lok Satta and CPI(M) have not resigned.