“A nation or a state cannot be said to be developed if a particular section is living in poverty,” he told TOI.“As a govt, we must make policies to expose the under-represented communities to opportunities. The decision to give 4% reservation to Muslims was taken in that perspective, not to appease anyone or get political gains.”
While campaigning in the Lok Sabha polls, several BJP stalwarts, including Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, had attacked reservation for Muslims in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. They had called it unconstitutional and promised to return the quota to SCs/STs and OBCs “from whom it was stolen”, once they returned to power.
TDP had backed Muslim reservation even after forging an alliance with BJP. Naidu had told TOI in an interview days before polling in Andhra Pradesh that having a difference of opinion on some specific issues while being in the alliance was not wrong. He had said that TDP and BJP “agreed to disagree” on the issue.
Elaborating his father’s stance on the contentious issue, Lokesh said that TDP believed in taking everyone along and that did not necessarily mean appeasement. He observed that Muslims in Andhra Pradesh were languishing in poverty. Lokesh further said that TDP never maintained a quid pro quo relationship like “we support you, you do this”. “We always wanted to have a cordial relationship with our partners at the national level and when it comes to larger issues of national interest, we will try to convince the Union govt if we believe that there are better ways to make a particular legislation,” he said.
Lokesh also clarified that Amaravati will be the only capital of Andhra Pradesh, while adding in the same breath that the soon-to-be-formed TDP govt also has grand plans for Visakhapatnam.
He said he had promised to make Visakhapatnam, the city that outgoing chief minister Jagan Mohan Reddy wanted as AP’s executive capital, India’s fifth largest economic hub. TDP already has a Rs 50,000-crore plan for the coastal city, Lokesh added.
While emphasising that TDP was always committed to ‘one state, one capital’, he said: “Our vision is to decentralise development but not the decentralisation of the capital. I had promised the people of Visakhapatnam during my Yuvagalam padayatra that TDP govt would make the city one of the best in the country.”
Lokesh said TDP had planned to make Visakhapatnam an information technology (IT) hub in its first term after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014 and even created infrastructure for the same. “Sadly, the YSRCP govt, despite claiming to develop Visakhapatnam as administrative capital, did not make any effort to improve infrastructure. Instead, they have stopped incentives to the IT companies soon after coming to power, forcing them to leave the state.”