A man in Bhadrachalam mourns his father’s death in the Mudigonda shooting. (AP)

New Delhi, July 29: Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy will have to battle the wrath of the Left and the guile of his party’s dissidents who have been waiting to “strike” at him.

Virbhadra Singh in Himachal Pradesh saw one of his senior ministers resign from the cabinet after a TV expose on his “vulgar birthday party”.

Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit is facing a transport crisis with private buses mostly staying off the road in protest against her government’s checks on their quality and maintenance after a series of ghastly accidents.

The phlegmatic Assam chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, was asked by the high command to pull up his socks and ensure there were no more high-profile abductions of non-Assamese by insurgent groups.

A government is about to fall in Goa on Monday.

As the Congress celebrated the “grand show of unity” it had put up across the country in the presidential election, the facade cracked days after Pratibha Patil was installed in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Worried party strategists have reportedly asked the general secretaries in charge of the “problematic” Congress-ruled states to keep closer watch on the functioning of the chief ministers and ensure that they are fed accurate information by the state party presidents and other functionaries.

It is believed that Sonia Gandhi and her political aides wondered how the Congress was caught “napping” in Goa and why a senior functionary like Margaret Alva — she is in charge of the state — could not cotton on to the presence of dissidence and a revolt by the allies against the government.

“It is a repeat of Karnataka and Jharkhand,” admitted a source. He recalled that despite the disproportionate number of Karnataka leaders in Sonia’s central team, Delhi was clueless when the Janata Dal(Secular) quietly struck a deal with the BJP and overthrew the Congress coalition last year.

Reddy, who has been in office for three years, was criticised by Congress veteran P. Janardhan Reddy when he had his relatives arrested for allegedly assaulting his brother and nephew.

Janardhan, who headed the Congress legislature party during the Telugu Desam Party rule, agreed to postpone his hunger strike when central leaders intervened.

Within days, Reddy had to apologise unconditionally to N. Chandrababu Naidu for allegedly calling him names in the Assembly. With elections due in 2009, the Congress’s biggest fear is that Reddy was giving a fillip to Naidu without the latter moving a finger.

The other apprehension was that he was driving the Left parties “closer” to the Telugu Desam after it severed links with the BJP.

The Congress has already lost an ally, the Telengana Rashtra Samiti, over the statehood issue.

CPM general secretary Prakash Karat told The Telegraph: “We will intensify our fight for the landless (in Andhra). The CM is directly responsible for whatever is happening.” He ruled out the possibility of speaking to the Prime Minister or Sonia. “We will fight it politically,” he said.

Congress sources cited several reasons for the problems in the states:

A lack of sync between the government and party

Central leaders being unable to take a proper view of events because of “conflicting” reports from the local party apparatuses and the government

Chief ministers behaving like a “law unto themselves”.