HYDERABAD, 30 May — Andhra Pradesh’s ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) yesterday said it would continue to support the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the center.

Setting aside all speculation about the TDP reviewing its stand on supporting the NDA, party president and Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu said the TDP did not want political instability in the country.

The TDP gave this clear message at the end of its three-day “Mahanadu” or annual conference held in the port city of Visakhapatnam.

The TDP has 29 members in Lok Sabha (lower house) and holds the key to the survival of Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA government. Speculations that the TDP might reconsider its stand were rife in the wake of the exposure of corruption in defense deals by the tehelka.com website and the defeat of BJP and other NDA partners in the recent assembly elections in four states and a Union territory.

Summing up a long debate on the political resolution, Naidu said the TDP’s support to NDA did not mean that it was subscribing to the BJP’s ideology. He warned that the TDP always had an option to withdraw support.

The TDP also declared that it would not compromise on its basic ideal of secularism and its demand for more autonomy to the states. A resolution on center-state relations asked the center to restrict its role to defense, foreign affairs, and transport.

The party would continue to exert pressure on the center and would continue its fight for decentralization of powers. Questioning the central government’s rationale of formulating policies and programs for the states by going straight to the villages over the head of state governments, he said: “When we are not able to effectively run the administration of 23 districts in the state, how can the central government run more than 600 districts all over the country.”

He also said more and more state subjects from the concurrent list were being shifted to the central list. “This must come to an end immediately,” he said.

He demanded an expeditious rationalization of revenue sharing arrangement between the center and the states. He said he was angry the states were being made to run to Delhi even for innocuous matters. “To get international flights to Hyderabad, we had to represent to Delhi hundreds of times.”

Another example of how the Center was eating into the resources of states was its plan to collect a service tax. “This is outrageous and unacceptable.

The center should give up such thinking,” he said, adding that “the way the service sector was expanding, the service tax will cross even the income tax.”  He said, “The center has no business to collect the service tax when it is the states who are providing all the facilities to the service sector.”