Congress-ruled Telangana and Karnataka have extended their support to the DMK government in Tamil Nadu over its opposition to the proposed delimitation of parliamentary constituencies.
Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy said he would attend the meeting called by Stalin in Chennai on the issue after taking permission from the high command.
"I welcome Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin's stand. I have to get permission from the (Congress) high command to attend the meeting. In principle, I have agreed to attend," Reddy told reporters in Delhi.
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Earlier in the day, a DMK delegation led by Tamil Nadu minister T.K. Nehru met Reddy in the national capital to invite him for the meeting.
Meanwhile, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah also extended support to the DMK move and requested his deputy, D.K. Shivakumar, to attend the meeting in Chennai to discuss the issue.
"Although I would like to participate in the meeting, due to my prior commitments, I am unable to do so," Siddaramaiah said in a letter to Stalin.
The Karnataka CM noted that his Tamil Nadu counterpart in his letter to him had raised crucial issues regarding the autonomy of states, with serious implications for the principles governing our polity.
The issue of delimitation of Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies based on new population benchmarks needs to be discussed at length by like-minded states, he further said.
Tamil Nadu minister K. Ponmudy and Rajya Sabha MP Mohammed Abdullah Ismail met Siddaramaiah at his residence in Bengaluru on Wednesday to invite him to the meeting.
Stalin has written to chief ministers of seven states to form a joint action committee against the delimitation exercise. Besides Karnataka and Telangana CMs, those who got Stalin's invitation for the meeting included Pinarayi Vijayan (Kerala), N. Chandrababu Naidu (Andhra Pradesh), Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal), Bhagwant Mann (Punjab) and Mohan Majhi (Odisha).
The opposition parties are claiming that the delimitation, if done based on population, will reduce the number of Lok Sabha seats from the southern states, and thus their representation in parliament.
