IN LATE 2009, a question was asked, with fire and blood, across Andhra Pradesh’s northwestern Telangana region. One year later, it seems a whole other question has been answered. When the Srikrishna Commission (SKC) was set up last February, its mandate was to identify the root causes that fuelled the 60-year-old movement for a separate state of Telangana, and recommend ways to address these issues. While the report, submitted on the last day of 2010, makes six recommendations, it has only scratched the surface of why 10 districts in the fourth largest state in the country have been screaming to break away.
In Telangana’s Adilabad district, 350 km from Hyderabad, residents of Anandpur village gather under a banyan tree. In the keen silence that descends, cotton farmer Raja Reddy, 52, speaks, “Imagine you have three sons who fight each other all day, every day. As a father, your first response is to pacify and make them understand. But after the fifth, when the fighting doesn’t stop, the sensible choice left is to divide your estate into three and let them go their separate ways.”
However, Raja has never felt like he was part of the AP family. The conversation under the banyan tree keeps returning to how the people of Telangana have nothing in common with coastal Andhra and Rayalseema, the other two regions of the state. When the Telangana movement was reignited through student agitations in December 2009, it defined itself as an identity movement, a call for “self-respect”. The movement has waxed and waned since before the 1956 merger of Telangana with AP, but never died down. Alongside it, influenced by it, evolved a political culture in Telangana. So much so that today, to sever the three elements of the movement — identity, economy and politics — is to glean a half-truth. But this is exactly what the report has done.
The report presents 461 pages of largely economic arguments disproving Telangana’s claim of backwardness. Often, it says, “There are a few crucial indicators on which Telangana is lagging behind.” But the statehood demand is deeply political, wound in narratives of “perceived injustice”, as the SKC itself calls it, and an unshakeable anger against discrimination from other regions. By stating Telangana has been the fastest growing region and Rayalseema is worse off than Telangana, the report painstakingly debunks the claim of poverty in Telangana, but it doesn’t devote the same thoroughness to the identity question. In doing so, the report presents an economic solution to a political problem.
In Dipaiguda, Bheema Reddy, 49, a cotton farmer and mandal Congress president, offers an instance of the politicisation. “Since all the power is with the Andhra lobby, nothing gets done here. Take the Penganga inter-state irrigation project, which could have changed our lives. MLAs, including the present one, have been trying for the past 20 years to get it going, but nothing has moved because he doesn’t have enough clout.”
It’s not just the lack of projects but also the differential response to needs that irks them. “In Andhra, if a coconut tree falls, they get Rs. 4,000 as crop insurance. Here, we get Rs. 300,” says Perkugudda resident M Linganna. When the state lost last year’s harvest to floods, the government reacted swiftly in Andhra. “The interest on their loans was waived and they got reasonable crop loss coverage. Here, we are yet to see a paisa,” he says.
The crowds that gather to discuss Telangana respond to an often repeated statement in the SKC report: the movement is primarily the doing of frustrated youth and poor Dalits whose disaffection at unemployment and backwardness respectively has been cynically exploited by an opportunistic political class to fuel a divide between Telangana and the rest of AP. “But the discrimination is real for us!” says Ravinder Reddy, 40. “Name one hero from Telangana in Telugu movies. It’s always the buffoons and villains who are from Telangana.” Raja adds, “Inter-marriages are very rare. Andhraites settled here prefer going 1,500 km back to Nellore to find a match. We only make good neighbours it seems, not good in-laws.”
DID THE SKC ask these questions when they visited Adilabad? “They were here for an hour. They conducted meetings at the Collector’s office and went to a single village 3 km away,” says Ravinder. The mobilisation, albeit political, has reached wide and deep, and its arguments of injustice are today part of the Telangana people’s idea of who they are. This unquantifiable but crucial element of the movement finds no place in the report.
But their economics might not be fully sound either. The SKC report doesn’t include any data from a 163-page report on the power sector in Telangana. K Raghu, executive engineer at AP Transmission Corporation, says that apart from factual errors about the location and establishment dates of hydel and thermal plants, the SKC report has “conveniently left out facts and documents we submitted to their technical expert VB Gupta”.
The electricity report shows that the state government incurs an annual loss of Rs. 1,100 crore in transporting coal from Telangana to power stations in other regions, when economic logic points at building projects close to the fuel source. Out of 19 power projects coming up in the state, only three are in Telangana.
Villagers describe a process of migration that finds no mention in the report. “Over the past 20 years, Andhraites have been migrating to Telangana, leasing and buying land,” says Ravinder. “Because of irrigation costs, agricultural land in Andhra is expensive. One acre would cost upwards of Rs. 1 crore. The best land in Adilabad costs Rs. 5 lakh. With more wealth and political connections, they are starting petrol pumps, real estate firms and cornering all infrastructure contracts.”
If the report had focussed as much on the social mechanisms and politics underpinning the fight for resources as it did on the resources itself, it might have asked pertinent questions that would have gone a long way in understanding the aspirations of people on both sides of the divide. Instead, it remains a document about a region, not its people.
No comments:
Post a Comment