A Bunch of Bullshitters!

The Justice Srikrishna Committee (JSC) has produced a report about Telangana which is “not worth a bucket of warm spit”, as John Nance Warner, the Vice President of the USA under John D Roosevelt, famously said on one occasion, albeit in a different context.

The JSC members listened to the story of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for eleven months, like the legendary listener who listened to the story of Ramayana day after day for eleven months. At the end, the Ramayana listener asked the narrator: Pray tell me, sir, what is the relationship of SEETHA to Lord RAMA? Like him, the Committee could not under stand, after listening for eleven long months, that the Telanganites do not want to stay united with the Seemandhraites because of the irreconcilable differences that they want self-rule in Telangana, their erstwhile Hyderabad state, which was an independent entity for nearly 224 years before the unfor tunate merger with Vishalandhra in 1956.

Greed, power lust, and cultural arrogance of Seemandhra brought the state to the present crisis. It is not going to be possible now to stay together. The people of Telangana told the Committee again and again that, for fifty six years, they had committees, councils, pacts etc with statutory guarantees but all were ignored or violated systematically and deliberately by the Seemandhra rulers. The councils etc look good on paper but they don’t work in practice as the people of Telangana have realised to their great cost.

If they, the Committee, really seriously understood this problem, they would not have proposed the same solution again as they did in the proposition 6: United AP with councils etc. If they were really sincere, they would not have put in counter arguments against Telangana while proposing a separate Telangana state, thus trying to neuter their own proposal.

To my knowledge, none of the commit tee members was lobotomized to produce such an intellectually confused, confusing, and self-contradictory report. So, the reasons and motives can only be guessed at as to why the Committee produced such an awful report – a stinking-armpit of a document.

Could they have been influenced by money, gifts, or lucrative deals? No! They looked comical at times but they didn’t look corrupt. The roly-poly Mr.Duggal and the slimline Justice Srikrishna did look like the famous comic duo, Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, but without the laughs or the wisecracks, except for one line: “Our report will please everyone!” This was a most hilarious line and they kept repeating it throughout the eleven month period they toured the state.

Some laugh lines are like that. You have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. The situation was simply not amenable for such a statement.

The whodunit

There are three organised groups which could have had a hand in the fiendish skulduggery perpetrated against Telangana: The Seemandhra leaders the Congress party at the centre and the biased bureaucratic babus who fed skewed and choreographed information to the committee.

Here, I will have to disagree with Sherlock Holmes who has been assisting us to unravel the mystery of the malevolence of the report against Telangana. Sherlock thinks that the Tamilian with extensive Andhra connections did it. But which Tamilian? Unfortunately, Sherlock had to leave for London in a hurry before he could nail the guy who has been secretly aiding the Seemandhra leaders. Sherlock promised to come back to investigate The Sign of the Five – that’s what we have tentatively decided to call this mystery. Sherlock, you remember, previously featured in The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle which had strong Indian flavour.

What about the Rasputin from over the other border who has been in cahoots with Andhra leaders for a long time and is a dab hand in political black arts, actively working with them behind the scenes against the interests of Telangana? He is certainly a strong suspect and has been on the short list as one to watch for a long time – a very slippery customer.

Could t h e C e• t r a l Governm ent have a c t i v e l y encouraged t h e Committee to produce a report which will keep the issue in a limbo? No! The Com mittee is unimpeachable, and impervious to any such influence or corruption. So, we come to the inevitable conclusion that the committee is plain stupid and that they did it all by themselves – to be totally irrelevant to the solution of the problem.

Super trash

The Justice Srikrishna Committee members (two permanent ones and three part-timers) have not proved themselves to be a fab five as some had hoped for. They have turned out to be a bunch of bullshitters, but it is utterly out of order to think that bullshitters are of no use at all to a society or to a government. Sometimes they can be useful. Here are some of the ways the JSC proved useful: 1 Following the December 9, 2009 announcement from the centre, stating that the process for the formation of a separate Telang ana state had started, there was panic, perturbation, and severe p u b l i c anxiety in Seemandhra. They wanted wider consultations. So the centre had to satisfy this demand with a committee.

2 The Seemandhra leaders were confident they could manipulate the outcome of the committee’s deliberations through various means available to them. In this, they feel, they have been successful.

3 The central government wanted to back away from the explosive issue they wanted to remove the immediate threat to its survival from the mass resignations of the Seemandhra MPs and MLAs and they wanted to delay the resolution of the problem until wiser counsels prevailed among the Seemandhraites or until such time that they could come to terms with the inevitability of the formation of Telangana state. It has served this purpose and the issue, we reckon, is moving in this direction.

Although what the Committee has written is proving irrelevant for us in Telangana, it helped to let the steam out of the Seemandhra pressure cooker. They, the Seemandhraites, can now see that their manipulated victory (with the JSC report) is proving hollow that we still insist they give back what is legitimately ours that we are not going to give up on our demand. The Seemandhra leaders can now go to the people in their region and say that they have tried but Telangana insists on going its own way and that the time has come to resolve the issue.

I’m not going to analyse the report in minute detail. There are ma ny startling omissions – and some high profile struggles such as the 1969 Telangana agitation were barely mentio ned. They deliberately glossed over many of the Telangana grievances, and skirted round the misdeeds perpetrated by the Seemandhra leaders against the region over five decades. It only steels us to carry on the struggle for Telangana with renewed vigour, which we most certainly shall.

After 54 years of Seemandhra domination, we can now see through their every trick and fraud, but, to rephrase a wellknown aphorism, the race is not always to the fraudsters, or the battle to the rich. We, in Telangana, may not be able to match Seemandhra’s wealth and influence. But we have the courage we have the heart we have the will and above all, we have justice on our side to win the final battle. As Horatius, the famous Roman defending ancient Rome against huge odds said: “And how can a man die better Than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his gods?” Like him, we shall fight for our Telangana, the land of our fathers’, our fathers’ ashes, every which way possible. In the coming days we shall see which Telangana MLA or MP will continue to sell his soul and the blood of the students and the martyrs of Telangana for the scraps and the bones the Seemandhra power-wielders may throw at him or her like they throw at their dogs. For our part, it does not matter which Tamilian or which Rasputin from over the border or which Rahu and Kethu bite us. We shall hold firm – and fight, until we achieve our legitimate goal.

By Dr.V.Ram Mohan

(The author is a doctor, a poet, and a political commentator) vrrao_05@yahoo.com The way forward ?