TELANGANA
Congress, BJP blame game
stalls bill

Are the BJP and the Congress serious about carving out a Telangana from the existing big-bully Andhra Pradesh?
The Congress-led UPA had utilised the services of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti during election time, but it seems to be refusing payback—and the TRS is getting restive.

By Shahid Faridi

The formation of a new state in the Indian Union-Telangana, an area known for its historical political effervescence-has never seemed closer than it does now. The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) contested the previous general election promising to carve out the new state from the extant state of Andhra Pradesh. The common minimum programme (CMP) drafted by the constituents of the victorious UPA iterated a similar resolve. At his annual press conference, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that work for the formation of Telangana had actually begun. President A P J Abdul Kalam, in his address to the two Houses of Parliament, said that framework of the state was high on the government's agenda.

But the truth is that with the merger of Andhra and Telangana into the composite state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956, Telangana's fate had been sealed forever. A gentleman's agreement by Andhra Pradesh had given Telangana an assurance of fair play, but five decades later, the reality is that Andhra Pradesh has reneged on every promise it had made. With all the privileges, wealth and power appropriated by the elite partners, Telangana continues to starve, struggle and suffer to this day.

So, the crore-rupee question is: Are the two largest political parties in India, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who had both rallied to the Telangana cause when exigency demanded it, really serious about the issue of slicing up Andhra Pradesh and possibly setting a precedent for more demands for mini- or even micro-statehood?

In fact, Telangana's birth is being delayed-inordinately, according to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS)-only because the two parties have created an irrelevant technical hurdle and are refusing to take a single step without first straightening out the kink.

Immediately after its shocking win in the previous general election, the Congress-led UPA set up a subcommittee headed by Union defence minister and Congress Working Committee member Pranab Mukherjee to ascertain the views of all political parties on the carving out of Telangana. So, Mukherjee wrote to all the political parties asking them to spell out their stand. And, barring the BJP, almost all the political parties have communicated their take on the issue in writing. The BJP's recalcitrance has given Mukherjee a handle to complain that his subcommittee's report has been delayed because it is still waiting for the BJP's written response.

The BJP, on its part, is walking an unaccustomed middle path. In mid-March, BJP president Rajnath Singh announced at a press conference at Hyderabad that his party supported the demand for the formation of Telangana "from the inner core of its heart". When asked why, if this was the case, it was not sending its views in writing to the subcommittee, he orated, "When the president of the BJP is announcing here that his party supports the demand, what is the need for a letter? Let the Congress bring a bill in Parliament. We will support it."

But the Congress considers this assurance inadequate and is refusing to introduce a bill on the ground that the government can move forward on the issue only after receiving, unequivocally on paper, the views of all the parties.

In 1997, at its Kakinaka constituency, the BJP had, in fact, passed a resolution for a separate state, but the sanctity of electorally-motivated promises soon faded. Once in power, the BJP pushed the Telangana idea to the side to please its ally, the Telugu Desam, which is fiercely anti-Telangana. The Left parties, too, became tired of demanding special packages for Telangana's development. And the Congress' penchant for backtracking is too frequent and evident to amplify upon: out of power in 2000, it appealed in favour of Telangana, even meeting the president to convince him. Then, everything went downhill in a hurry.

For the TRS, this is one hell of an exasperating stalemate. It has been spearheading the demand for a separate Telangana under the leadership of K Chandrashekhar Rao-and it is finally getting restive, threatening to pull out of the UPA in May if the issue continues to hang fire.
In July last year, the TRS quit the Congress-led government in Andhra Pradesh by getting all its ministers to resign en masse. The TRS, which has five members in the Lok Sabha, had actually decided to continue its support to the Centre till the current crisis.

Chandrashekhar Rao, who had supported the Congress during the previous general election at a time when no one-least of all the Congress itself-had expected to win, and everyone with a skin to save had been deserting the ship, has been banking on the word given to him by Congress president Sonia Gandhi regarding the formation of a Telangana state. She had made this assurance when the Congress' own rank-and-file had begun fleeing in the face of the ostensibly unbeatable "India Shining" campaign of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

The Congress had then been desperate to strike an alliance with Rao's party in Andhra Pradesh to lift its chances in the Telangana region. In fact, the Congress' key strategist, Pranab Mukherjee, had been calling Rao five times a day to work out an alliance. When Rao shied away, citing opposition within his party to any alliance with the Congress, Mukherjee suggested a clandestine meeting at Kolkata, where, he promised, he would make Rao an offer that Rao wouldn't be able to refuse.
The rest is history: the Congress included Telangana in its election manifesto.

Today, however, Rao is an embittered man, under tremendous pressure from his party's Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and Members of Parliament (MPs) to terminate his support of the UPA if the Congress and UPA refuse to deliver Telangana on the promised platter.
Sources close to Rao told Realpolitik that he is likely to take a call on this during the next session of Parliament and return to the restive Telangana region to intensify the ground campaign. "We will expose the doublespeak of both the BJP and the Congress if they continue to play games to delay the formation of Telangana," says a TRS MP. "Our patience is running out. We cannot wait for too long-2006 is the year of Telangana."

"The year of Telangana" has been a long time coming. On September 17, 1948, more than a year after India's independence, the region became free from centuries of feudal oppression. Previously a part of the Nizam's dominion, Telangana had been an independent state for eight long years with Hyderabad as its capital, till the linguistic cartography that apportioned India made Andhra Pradesh a full-fledged state.

Andhra Pradesh itself, separated from the (former) state of Madras, became an independent state in 1953, with Kurnool as its capital. Soon after, this resource hungry state began clamouring for a merger with Telangana and for the formation of Vishal Andhra-a demand that prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, no mincer of words, said smacked of "expansionist imperialism".

But, after centuries of marginalisation, the people of Telangana were unwilling to surrender their lives, their resources and their freedom again. The State Reorganisation Commission of 1956 endorsed the Telangana peoples' fear of exploitation by the Andhraites and recommended that Telangana remain a separate state. Political manipulation, however, saw to it that Telangana merged with Andhra to form Andhra Pradesh-the wishes of its people be damned.

And Telangana is rich in resources, which is one of the reasons why Andhra Pradesh is so chary of letting it go. Two of India's major rivers, the Krishna and the Godavari, wind their way through Telangana, which gathers two-thirds of its water from this riparian harvest. Telangana's Hyderabad government had drawn up an ambitious blueprint to entirely harness these waters.

Today, more than 90 per cent of Telangana's share of the Godavari water quietly flows into Andhra Pradesh. Year after year, the government's has been promising to revive and restore irrigation projects, and the budget shows massive fund allocations. But Telangana remains thirsty, parched and barren-kilometre after kilometre of cracked subsoil. The Bachawat Tribunal on water allocation had foreseen the situation in 1976 and had warned that Telangana should not be deprived of its rightful share of water. Obviously, it wasn't politic for the powers-that-be to listen.
All projects, some formulated well before the merger and, in fact, promised in order to hasten it, were promptly abandoned. Those already in process came to a grinding halt. This skulduggery marks half-a-century of neglect and exploitation.

In Telangana, the area under surface irrigation has, in fact, shrunk by almost half, from 20 lakh acres in 1956 to just about 12 now. While water flows to Andhra from the Srisailam project, Telangana continues to wait for its share. Promised decades ago, the Srisailam left bank Tamil canal is yet to be excavated. The Nagarjuna Sagar dam, originally proposed at Aresalan, 19 km from the present site, would have given abundant water to Telangana, but soon after the merger it was moved downstream, leaving most of these regions high and dry. And with the further diversion of water for power generation, Telangana is starved of water here. The Godavari, the "Ganges of the South", meanders through Telangana for almost 960 km, yet Sriramsagar is the lone project on this mighty river; and even this project, grounded 40 years ago, is in the first phase of irrigating the proposed 1,500,000 acres, with hardly 600,000 acres irrigated.

Once landowning farmers are landless labourers today, and almost 1,400,000 people migrate from this district in search of work every year. Some invariably die of starvation, and these make the news-for a week. For centuries, tanks and ponds were the lifeline of Telangana, and more than 150,000 water bodies once dotted its landscape, sometimes linked with chains and water flowing from one canal to another.

Mehboobnagar, the largest district of Telangana, is where the river Krishna, with its tributaries, the Bhima and the Tungabhadra, enters the state. Yet drought has become a permanent feature in Mehboobnagar. Today, the region, unable to sustain its animal wealth, has lost more than two-thirds of it to slaughterhouses. Bairaram Reddy—the villagers now call him "Borewell" Reddy—has sunk 56 borewells, of which 49 have failed. Says Reddy, "Even after 56, if I am still continuing, it is only with the hope that somewhere I will be able to find some water."

This obsession with drilling borewells is driven by despair, but it is also pushing these helpless farmers into death traps and deaf traps. For every farmers who have lost their lives there are countless farmers in distress. Just another bad weather invariably pushes these fragile people to the edge.

Furthermore, the loss of educational and employment avenues has translated into the death of the collective dream. From the state secretariat to the high court, Telanganites face continuous rejection-even their share of opportunity. The Andhra Pradesh secretariat accommodates just 8 per cent of its workforce from this region, while the high court has not more than 20 per cent people from here. Government orders were issued in 1969, and again in 1985, to repatriate about 82,000 employees who have usurped the jobs of the Telanganites, but none of these orders were ever implemented.

Tellingly enough, not a single person from Telangana has graced the seat of the advocate-general, although they have been distinguishing themselves elsewhere. The recent appointments of a mere 7 per cent of people of Telangana origin among 86 magisterial positions only shows the extent of the neglect.

Frustrated by continuous exclusion, the people of Telangana had launched the agitation for a separate state in 1969. After more than 400 youth had died, a spate of new accords was signed, new orders were issued, and devices formulated to pacify the agitating masses.
Nothing worked then; nothing is working now. And the TRS' K Chandrashekhar Rao has been left holding the can.