A party with a famously centralised power structure has batted for federalism – not everywhere in India, not in response to all demands for statehood that are perceived as economically viable and maybe advisable, but only in Andhra Pradesh, which gives the UPA as many as 33 Congress Members of Parliament.
That this was a purely political decision is a given, coming as it does with months to go for polls – and Andhra Pradesh has Assembly polls scheduled in 2014 alongside the Parliamentary elections.
The impact of the formation of India’s 29th state on Hyderabad – called Cyberabad amid the infrastructural leaps and attractive business models it built in the early part of the last decade – and on the investments coming into what will be the joint capital of Telangana and the rest of Andhra remain unknown.
With Assembly polls due, how the backlash from the united Andhra activists will affect the Congress government run by N Kiran Kumar Reddy is also unclear. However, the Congress party in Delhi calculates that it will reap some political benefits.
For one, the 33 MPs from united Andhra Pradesh in 2009 were key to the formation of the UPA. Much has changed since 2009 in the mega-state’s politics.
Briefly, following the death of then chief minister YS Rajashekhara Reddy in a chopper crash in 2009, relations soured gravely between his son Jaganmohan Reddy and the Congress party high command. Alongside the turmoil over Telangana, Andhra Pradesh is expected to vote very differently in 2013 as compared to 2009.
The Congress, needless to say, will take a body blow from the growing strength of the YSR Congress. The TRS, chief mover of the separate statehood demand, has its own loyal constituents, and the Congress will be hoping for the TRS agreeing to merge with it.
With 17 of the 42 Andhra Pradesh Parliamentary constituencies to form Telangana’s representation at the Centre, the Congress naturally expects these will be claimed by a friendly TRS or Congressmen themselves.
What about the remaining seats, the votes of nearly 60 per cent Andhra’s voters?
Amid growing mobilization by Jaganmohan Reddy and the TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu – both have made overtures to the NDA, though only one is expected to make the cut – the Congress will hardly be left with enough support at the grassroots to take the backlash from anti-Telangana parties in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema. But the Congress will hope that these votes are fragmented.
This is not the first time, or even the first general election, that has seen the Telangana issue flare up. Back in 2004, the Congress joined hands with the TRS and assured that a separate state of Telangana would be formed, only to backtrack later.
In 2009, K Chandrashekhara Rao’s fast unto death forced the Congress to bite the bullet and once again announce that separate statehood for Telangana was on their agenda, only to later set up a commission to look into the matter of bifurcating the state.
When the Commission submitted its cautious report in 2010, the Congress may have hoped the status quo can be maintained even though the TRS opposed the report hotly.
But then the Congress party’s mathematics for the 2014 Parliamentary polls told a different tale.
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