The congress core committee is weighing two options on which to take a final call. One is Rayala-Telangana in which two Rayalaseema districts of Kurnool and Anantapur will be merged with Telangana with Hyderabad as the capital.

The second option is the creation of Telangana comprising nine districts with Hyderabad as the joint capital of Telangana and Andhra which will be administered as a Union territory like Chandigarh. The strategy is to keep Hyderabad separate from both Telangana and Seemandhra campaigners. A third new element is that Jaipal Reddy is emerging as the high command candidate to head the new entity in the state, whichever it is.

Unlike in the past the Telangana issue is dealt at the Congress party level now and it will be converted into UPA Government Issue only when at party level there is complete unanimity and AP congress accepted the core committee decision. Last time around, it was then Union minister P Chidambaram who had made the announcement in favour of Telangana on December 9, 2009, and smarting from the big blunder, the Congress leaders decided to first deal with the issue at the party-level before taking it to the coalition partners.