The Congress leadership bit the Telangana bullet on Tuesday. It decided to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh to create a separate state of Telangana—a move that will be aloss to the politically muscular state but will be a gain for the Congress as it’s expected to revive the party’s fortunes in the state ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
As reported by INN on July 29, Hyderabad will remain the common capital of the splintered state for 10 years—a balancing act that recognizes Telangana’s claim on the city but seeks to soften the blow to the opponents who were also concerned about the investments of coastal Andhra businesses in the capital. The Centre will help AP build a new capital.
There are indications that a mechanism will be created to vest the governor with oversight of law and order in the city: an arrangement that falls short of turning the city into a Union Territory but reassures those worried about a sudden change in its character.
The call on whether to include two districts of Rayalaseema region, Ananthpur and Kurnool, will be taken later. The Congress leadership favours the idea but is wary of committing itself before fully assessing the fallout.
The desire to do well in Telangana appears to be the main driver behind the decision. While announcing the CWC’s decision, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh triggered speculation of a merger of TRS with the Congress. Singh recalled TRS chief K Chandrashekhar Rao’s declaration that he would merge his party if the latter created Telangana.
Pieces of the puzzle were fast falling in place when TRS chief Chandrashekhar Rao said that he was a man of his word. Political circles estimate that the Congress calculation is to sweep the Telangana region, which has 17 Lok Sabha seats, in alliance with the TRS. The numbers of Lok Sabha seats which the party can hope to win will swell to 21 if the districts of Ananthpur and Kurnool are clubbed with Telangana: a huge improvement for the party which had appeared to be a washout in the state.
Giving its nod to the division of AP after consultations with UPA partners, the CWC said that the Centre should take steps to form a separate state of Telangana. It said that the Centre should institute a mechanism “to address the concerns of Andhra and Rayalseema on sharing of river waters, power and security of citizens”. The CWC also said the Polavaram Irrigation Project should be declared a national project.
The Congress is expected to act expeditiously in order to reap the goodwill in the Telangana region. There are indications that the Union Cabinet may decide on Thursday to request the President to ask the Andhra Pradesh legislature to adopt a resolution spelling out where it stands on the issue of bifurcation.
The resolution of the state assembly will not be binding. Under the Constitution, the power to create new states and alter the boundaries of existing ones rests solely with Parliament.
The Congress’s anxiety to clinch the issue swiftly was evident from the way AICC general secretaries Digvijay Singh and Ajay Maken sought to showcase steps taken by their party for the creation of Telangana. These included, the announcement of December 9, 2009, something which the party had virtually dumped in the face of resentment from the anti-Telangana camp.
Though Congress leaders concede the breakaway faction led by Jagan Mohan will remain the dominant formation in coastal and Rayalseema regions, they are banking on his desire to keep a distance from the BJP as well as legal troubles to hope that Jagan Mohan Reddy will not be averse to doing business post-poll. Anti-Telangana group’s last-ditch efforts fails
Creation of Telangana
The creation of Telangana will have meaning only if it creates a new language of inclusive politics, or else it will merely amount to another demarcation on the map. While creating a State called Telangana, the demand for which was first articulated and fought for half-a-century ago, has been smoother this time round compared to the botched attempt in 2009, it will be more difficult to construct or re-construct a new idiom in this new State. It will mean deconstructing the hitherto known and practised idioms of power, politics and the general socio-cultural ethos.
Idea of India
But that apart, some other issues come to mind in the context of ‘separate state’ movements anywhere in the country. The foremost is why there is such a sense of sanctity about the idea of India as we have come to accept today, if there is a universal idea of India? Or, to put it differently, is India merely about the number of States we have today, most of which were ‘made’ after independence along linguistic lines? Has the linguistic paradigm (with the language itself a more sanctified standardised version of the more dominant social groups) served well all the people in that state? When people talk about Telangana, what are they “relating to”? What are the metaphors that have been used for the region in the discourse on Telangana in the last two years? What suggestions do people make when they critique the idea of Telangana as a State, and what is the validity of these suggestions vis-à-vis the Indian nation as we have come to accept or assume or ‘get along’ with?
In 2009-10, a series of television programmes on the Telangana statehood question was organised and telecast by the Telugu channel. The format was an outdoor, popular debate platform across Telangana, coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions of Andhra Pradesh. It was also touted as the longest running live debates telecast on any television channel in Asia. The metaphors that people used — across regions — were fascinating from a sociological and historical perspective. It led one to wonder what it is that people identify with — a region, a regional culture, an administrative entity, or an abstraction at its best, called State? One never hears of patriotism to a State as one does to a nation or an idea of a nation. So it was interesting to see words of patriotism and jingoism about the Telugu State, Andhra Rashtram and a mother image of Telugu, the language, and a universalised language at that.
Most often, people spoke of “divorce” (vidaakulu), and fights between “brothers”. In Telangana as well as other regions, the question asked in every debate was why when a wife wishes for a divorce, should she not be given it? Why force her to live with an exploitative husband? The wife was always Telangana while Coastal Andhra always got the exploitative husband image. But this was just one of the many metaphors. In one debate after the other, what became apparent was the way people related to the idea of a region, and how they articulated it politically. Sometimes, it laid bare the paradox of it all. For, if people evoked a history of a region in terms of its culture, language, customs, (bhasa, yasa), festivals, even histories of dynasties (Kakatiya, Nizam) in a pre-modern sense of the term, they looked for its resolution in the post-independence category of a State in a democratic (necessarily democratic, for there were never any other possibilities expressed other than elections, Bill in Parliament, etc.) way.
Hence, what is a State? And where does the idea of a region encompass the idea of an ‘evolution’ or metamorphosis into a state? But there were also other aspects — that of Telangana having been a State on its own before it was forced to be merged into the Andhra Pradesh we know of, since 1956. Where these views were expressed — and they have been expressed most often in political and intellectual circles — the idea of the history of a place seemed filled with yet another kind of paradox. For, which history do the people invoke and how far back in time does it go? In this sense, is it the history of the Nizam, and the Nizam’s Dominions or is it farther back in time during the several chiefdoms and monarchies the region saw? Then, where does the history of Telangana begin and what does it encompass?
Deeper questions
These were my thoughts as I observed the movement. But there are even deeper questions, which go beyond mere Telangana statehood and could be seen as significant markers for other regions that have been articulating a demand for statehood, including in the north-east and elsewhere. The movement that became political articulation for a state started not with the idea of a politico-physical entity, that is State (with a capital S), but a historico-cultural, and very much located, rooted region. Wherever these demands have been made, the metaphors of resistance have close resonance to the idea of fighting against colonisation and domination of a people and culture that became marginalised. In Andhra Pradesh, the increasingly standardised Telugu-ness built over a period, post-Andhra 1960s, was no less responsible for Telangana people feeling marginalised.
Telugu cinema, All India Radio programmes (the radio plays, or even the programme called Paadi Pantalu with an overtly Rayalaseema tone to the conversations between a Peddiah, and a Chinamma) in Hyderabad, theatre, music and other platforms overplayed the standard dominant Telugu-ness, marginalising not just the Telangana language — it was usually referred to as a ‘mere dialect’ — or culture, but even agrarian systems. A water-intensive and paddy-cotton-focussed agrarian rhythm replaced dryland, rain-fed non-paddy agriculture. Food culture too changed drastically over a long period of this domination of one region (or two) over the other.
The regions in question being coastal Andhra, specifically, with its water-based history and culture, and its industrial and outward looking history (since colonial times) and later Rayalaseema (with a primary upper caste group becoming predominant and holding power in successive governments). In the case of Telangana, there was a perceived feeling of a people’s cultural ethos — even though the people belonged to different castes and communities. There was an overarching Telangana identity they invoked, which lay in many such marginalisations —food culture, language, and an unequal economic development compounded the problem.
Will the creation of Telangana stall the Polavaram dam, which is obviously heavily tilted towards provision of water for industry and development in the coastal corridor of A.P.? Nearly 80 per cent of the submergence happens to be in the Telangana region (in Khammam district). Will the new Telangana state be about re-imagining a State far more inclusive than Andhra Pradesh state has been, in development of rural areas outside Hyderabad? Will it give the Dalits and tribal communities far more representation in constructing this new State? Will it revert to the agrarian regime that was indigenous to it? And bring to the mainstream the food culture that has now become a mere fad (jonna rotti, etc.)? And, at the same time, will it allow for diversity to be its mainstay rather than a monolithic universal economic ethic?
In the larger scheme of things, when states are created, they do not necessarily translate into representation and acknowledgment of pluralistic traditions. Will Telangana show the way for a pluralistic context instead of an overarching dominant caste and class based polity? If it is the latter, it will be far more difficult to construct a new idiom for this State, and it might just become another physico-political entity. Another number in our federal structure, another demarcation on our map of India.
