Assembly speaker Kiran Reddy replaces Rosaiah as Andhra CM

In a day of fast-paced developments, Konijeti Rosaiah, 77, was replaced as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh by Kiran Kumar Reddy, 50, presently Speaker of the state legislative assembly. Reddy will be sworn into office tomorrow.

Reddy was selected by national party chief Sonia Gandhi, in consultation with senior central party leaders, after an evening meeting of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) unanimously passed a resolution authorising her to choose Rosaiah’s successor.

The CLP meet, with 140 of the 156 Congress MLAs, was also attended by Union ministers Pranab Mukherjee, Veerappa Moily, A K Antony and Ghulam Nabi Azad. They later met and discussed the issue with Gandhi, after which the name of Reddy was announced.

The choice appeared to have been partly dictated by both community considerations — more than half the party MLAs are Reddys, unlike Rosaiah — and the strong dissidence campaign of Y S Jaganmohan Reddy, M.P., the death of whose father, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, in a helicopter crash in September last year, left the CM’s post vacant. Rosaiah, then the finance minister, was chosen to fill the post, though he lacked a political base of his own, in what was seen as a short-term arrangement.

Kiran Kumar Reddy hails from the same region as Jaganmohan and his father, Rayalaseema in southern Andhra. They come from adjoining districts.

The new CM will have to handle the Jaganmohan problem and also the raging movement for statehood for the Telangana region, expected to jump in emotion after the report, expeted quite soon, of the Justice Srikrishna committee on the subject. It is said that Rosaiah, who was in Delhi yesterday, was told by party chief Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel that the Congress president wanted him to quit immediately. Today, he simply told journalists he was stepping down for personal reasons.

“Because of my advanced age and heavy work pressure, I am unable to cope. Hence, I sought permission from the (party) high command for my resignation,” he said before giving his resignation letter to Governor E S L Narasimhan. His tenure lasted 14 months and 21 days.

Denying any political reasons for his sudden decision, Rosaiah said he “enjoyed the goodwill of the Prime Minister and the Congress core committee”.

The last time a CM was replaced in AP was in September 1992, when N Janardhana Reddy was asked to quit in the light of a furore over according permission for establishment of private engineering colleges.

Thrust into the driver’s seat under trying circumstances, the chief ministership had been a bumpy ride for Rosaiah. Some of his Cabinet colleagues, who were close to YSR, openly challenged his leadership.

Added to his woes was the intensified Telangana agitation and his own lack of a popular base. In his own words, Rosaiah had “no groups”. His tendency to leave all contentious matters to the party high command and lack of assertiveness further eroded his authority.