india

Updated: May 30, 2019 18:07 IST

Chief Ministers of two Telugu states – Telangana’s K Chandrashekhar Rao and Andhra Pradesh’s YS Jagan Mohan Reddy – may end up missing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan later this evening.

The two politicians were to fly together from Vijayawada where Jagan Mohan had taken oath as chief minister just a few hours earlier. But, according to reports, KCR got held up at the first lunch that he had hosted as chief minister for his guests. That guest list included DMK’s MK Stalin from Tamil Nadu and KCR, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti boss who was re-elected as chief minister last year.

Sources said Jagan Reddy took the guests to his residence about 10 km away at Tadepalli for lunch. By the time they finished the lunch at 2.30 pm, they got to know that there was no permission for the special flight to land in Delhi, according to YSRCP sources.

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Jagan Mohan Reddy led the YSR Congress Party that he had founded in Andhra Pradesh to a landslide victory in the assembly elections held along with Lok Sabha elections. Jagan Mohan took oath in Telugu at 12.23 p.m, the auspicious time chosen by his advisors. But Andhra’s mint-fresh chief minister got stuck due to the engagements that followed including a speech where he presented his vision and mission for building a new Andhra Pradesh.

The precise details are still hazy but sources said, the dignitaries slipped up on the timelines leading to a late lunch. They weren’t taking a commercial flight and it did not seem to matter. But it did.

When they were finally prepped to fly out to Delhi, the authorities in Delhi told them that they were too late to land in Delhi before the airspace around the national capital would be closed to non-scheduled flights. The only commercial flight that would have taken off from Vijayawada was scheduled to land at 6.45 pm. Narendra Modi’s oath ceremony begins at 7 pm.

Jaga Mohan was in Delhi a few days earlier to call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and shares more than cordial relations with the BJP. He had recently said that he wished that the NDA gets no more than 250 seats so that he could negotiate a special status for Andhra Pradesh in exchange for his party’s support in Parliament.

Reddy’s party won a landslide victory in the Andhra assembly on Thursday, bagging 152 of the state’s 175 seats. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) managed a mere 22. The YSRC also won 22 of the state’s 25 Lok Sabha seats.