Activists have not only filed a petition but are also mobilising people from districts to do the same and have set a target of 200 RTI applications that they would mobilise. Ten RTI petitions have already been filed from Warangal alone. “We want them to share the contents of the committee recommendations with us before politicians get to look at it,” said Rakesh Reddy Dubbudu, activist, who filed his application under the special clause listed under Section 7(1) of the RTI Act. According to the listed clause, any information which has the potential to affect lives and liberty of people at large, must be provided within 48 hours of the receipt of the request petition.

“The committee recommendations definitely concerns the life and liberty of the masses who have been actively involved in the movement. Therefore we, as citizens of the country, are better suited to get a copy of the submitted recommendations ahead of the politicians,” said Dubbudu. If the activists do get a response to their petition in 48 hours (by Monday), they plan to circulate the content among the masses.

Filed with an objective to put to rest the speculations about the formation of a new state as is currently doing the rounds, this application can however be turned down by the PIO if he so decides. “If he thinks that this information does not hold enough ground, then it can be turned down, but the onus is on him to prove the same,” said another RTI activist. Activists are hoping that the ministry’s office will follow the RTI Act in letter and spirit and thereby furnish information under this special clause. Further, they argue that since the committee has worked with public money, it is then justified that people know what the contents of the report are.

RTI activists have also asked non-resident Indians to file similar applications in the Indian embassies located in their respective countries.

(Courtesy: TOI)

* * *

Important Links to RTI in USA

• Washington DC Embassy, Right To Information Act (RTI)
  http://www.indianembassy.org/right-to-information.php
• New York Consulate, Right To Information Act (RTI)
  http://www.indiacgny.org/php/showNews.php?linkid=237&newsid=369
• Chicago Consulate, Right To Information Act (RTI)
  http://chicago.indianconsulate.com/RTI_ACT/RTI_Act.html
• San Francisco Consulate (RTI)
  http://www.cgisf.org/RTI.html
• Houston, TX
  http://www.cgihouston.org

- – * – -

• Rakesh Dubbudus Blog for more info on RTI
  http://rakesh-will-do-it.blogspot.com
• Right to Information Act (India)
  http://rti.gov.in/

The newly created smaller States, namely, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, have achieved much higher growth rates in their GSDP than the targets set for the Tenth Five Year Plan, whereas the growth rates achieved by their parent states, namely, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh fell significantly short of the targets. (Planning Commission, 2008; Rao, 2009) Further, the growth rates achieved in the first two years of the Eleventh Plan, that is, 2007-08 and 2008-09, by Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand were significantly higher than those achieved by their parent States. Apart from releasing the creative energies of the people, viability of smaller States may have contributed to better governance, attracting greater private investment from outside as well as planning and utilising resources more efficiently. (World Bank, 2007)

An extremely encouraging development is in respect of Bihar, where the average growth rate achieved at 9.7 per cent per annum during these two years was significantly higher than for Jharkhand at 5.8 per cent per annum. (Aiyar, 2010; Rao, 2010) This may be explained by improved governance, of late, in this State, facilitated not the least by the fact that with the creation of Jharkhand, Bihar has become less heterogeneous and much smaller in area, with the size of its population getting reduced by about 25 per cent.

Experience has demonstrated the failure of regional planning to ensure adequate development of backward regions within the larger States. This is explained by the politics of planning in democracy inherent in such States characterised by regional unevenness in development. The experience of Maharashtra and Gujarat amply illustrates the failure to develop backward regions, despite the existence of constitutional provisions for setting up Regional Planning Boards and the powers entrusted to the Governor to review the progress of development under such regional plans. This experience underlines the need for conceding separate Statehood for certain backward regions like Telangana and Vidarbha.

The observations of B.R. Ambedkar, the principal architect of our Constitution, on the desirability of smaller States are prophetic. He welcomed the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Commission in 1955 for the creation of Hyderabad State consisting of Telangana region and creation of Vidarbha as a separate State. Further, he envisaged the division of Uttar Pradesh into three States (Western, Central and Eastern); Bihar into two (North and South or present Jharkhand); Madhya Pradesh into two (Northern and Southern); and Maharashtra into three (Western,Central and Eastern). He was for linguistic homogeneity of a State in the sense of ‘one State-one language’ and not ‘one language-one State’. He thus envisaged two Telugu speaking States, three Marathi speaking States and a large number of Hindi speaking States. (Ambedkar, 1979)

While arguing for smaller States, Ambedkar was guided basically by two considerations. One, no single State should be large enough to exercise undue influence in the federation. Drawing from the American experience, he thought that smaller States were in the best interests of healthy federalism. On this issue, his views were similar to those of K.M. Panikkar, set out in his note of dissent to the Report of the States Reorganisation Commission. Second, he thought that socially disadvantaged sections are likely to be subjected to greater discrimination in bigger States because of the consolidation of socially privileged or dominant groups. (Ambedkar, 1979)

Over the last half-a-century, two new dimensions have been added. Population growth and the multiplicity of developmental functions have rendered governance in large-size States inefficient. Secondly, in the context of development planning under democracy, significant regional diversities with respect to the historically inherited levels of infrastructure and institutions within certain large States have given rise to severe tensions concerning the distribution of benefits from development. These tensions have reached a point where harmonious development seems no longer possible without their break-up into smaller States which are relatively homogeneous. (Rao, 2010)

¨

The agitations for separate Statehood for Telangana in the Telangana region as well as for Samaikhya (United) Andhra Pradesh in the Andhra region are in full swing now. The agitation in Telangana is unprecedented in its sweep, being universal or, at any rate, far more widespread than in 1969, involving, among others, students, farmers, women and even children. The movement is virtually taken over and led by the students, all of whom were obviously born at least a decade after the agitation of 1969. It appears as if history is repeating itself or time is standing still for over four decades so far as this issue is concerned!

Curiously, in the case of the Andhra region, history appears to have been overturned. The ‘Jai Andhra’ or separate Andhra agitation of 1972-73 was triggered-off by the land reform legislation and the validation of Mulki Rules (preference for natives of Telangana in employment) by the Supreme Court, because of which the big landed sections as well as educated youth could lose in the integrated State. Over the last four decades, however, certain leading business sections, including those involved in real estate business from the Andhra region, developed a big stake in Telangana, particularly in and around Hyderabad city. Thanks to the lop-sided urbanisation and concentration of financial sector services and IT industry in Hyderabad in the post-reform period, the educated youth—most of whom were born after the ‘Jai Andhra’ agitation like their Telangana counterparts—could understandably have developed an emotional identification with the capital city and so a stake in Samaikhya (United) Andhra Pradesh.

Guided by the consensus among the major political parties in favour of the formation of separate Telangana State, as espoused in their election manifestos and reiterated by them as recently as on December 7, 2009, the Central Government on December 9 announced its decision to initiate the process for the formation of the Telangana State. Within hours, this decision triggered off a counter-agitation in the Andhra region for a united Andhra Pradesh, leaders of the major political parties taking sides by getting divided horizontally on regional lines. It is not clear whether these leaders did not mean what they promised earlier on Telangana in the expectation that no worthwhile initiative would come from the Centre or could not anticipate the adverse public reaction in the Andhra region in the event of any favourable move on the issue. In any case, this has placed the Centre in a difficult situation leading to the stalemate in the resolution of the crisis.

As it is, the Constitution fully empowers the Centre to carve out new States, the role of the State legislatures being limited to merely expressing their views on the proposed Bill by the Centre. While politics cannot be wished away in a democracy and the Centre cannot normally be expected to proceed against the wishes of the majority of legislators of a State, ultimately, politics in a democracy have to come to terms with the provisions of the Constitution and respect the universal demand of the people of a region for separate Statehood. Also, in the long-run, the youth of any region in the modern age, imbued as it would be with the democratic spirit, would come to respect the people’s wishes from the other region for separate Statehood. Besides, a pride in the capacity to develop oppor-tunities in one’s own State is bound to come into play. Addressing the legitimate concerns of the stakeholders is essential to facilitate this process.

There is no alternative to the Centre as well as the leaders of both the regions taking initiatives for a constructive dialogue for resolving the outstanding issues by addressing the legitimate concerns of the stakeholders, to pave the way for separate Statehood for Telangana and thus end the perpetual uncer-tainty undermining the harmonious develop-ment of both the regions. While agitations are necessary for the assertion of legitimate rights, in a democracy, constructive dialogue is indis-pensable for bringing such aspirations to fruition.

References

Aiyar, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria (2010), “Fast Growth Trickles Up from the States”, Economic Times, January 6.

Ambedkar, Dr Babasaheb (1979), Writings and Speeches, Vol. I (Part II—On Linguistic States), Education Department, Government of Maharashtra.

Planning Commission (2008), Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-2012), Vol. I, Government of India, New Delhi.

Rao, C.H.H. (2009), “Regional Disparities, Smaller States and Statehood for Telangana”, Mainstream, Vol. XLVII, No. 12, March 7.

Rao, C.H.H. (2010), “Statehood for Telangana”, Economic Times, January 9.

Rao, C.H.H. (2010), Regional Disparities, Smaller States and Statehood for Telangana, Academic Foundation, New Delhi.

World Bank (2007), Jharkhand: Addressing the Challenges of Inclusive Development, Rural Poverty and Economic Management, India Country Management Unit, South Asia.

The author, a distinguished economist, is currently an Honorary Professor, Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad. He can be contacted at chhrao9@yahoo.com

(Courtesy: MainstreamWeekly)

The Andhra plutocrats are on a high after pulling off the Shri Krishna Committee and decided to celebrate it with some complimentary ‘action’ on the students who have been sticking out like sore thumbs all through. In what seems to be a planned, deliberate attack on Osmania University students to provoke them into a reaction and to brand them violent and discredit the Telangana movement, police agents have unleashed terror on behalf of the plutocrats last night in OU campus. They did not spare even the media and went on a rampage across the campus injuring scores of students – boys and girls and the Journos.

The students have been agitating non-violently and in the most innovative ways for nearly 70 days now. They have been the drivers of this just movement when the politicians let the Telangana people down. They have been clamped on with all kinds of restrictions and they have been successfully overcoming all by tapping into their constitutional rights. The Vidyarthi Garjana held in early January was a rude shock to the plutocrats. Even when the police and Govt refused permission for a meeting, the student JAC went to court, got permission and without the help of single political party (as per court’s directive) held a mammoth meeting with around 2 lakh students in the campus. Such is the fear among our Samaikyavadi brothers that they made sure many areas in Telangana districts suffered power outage during the meeting so that the Visuals don’t reach them! After that, the students held the ABVP Ranabheri, KU Vidyarthi Polikeka, Telangana Padayatra on a huge scale and took the Telangana movement into critical momentum. It is in this light that the politicians were forced to follow suit much to the consternation of the Andhra plutocrats.

The Plutocrats with their clout ‘managed’ the Shri Krishna committee Terms of Reference (ToR) so much that the Telangana politicians were jolted into submission by the sheer impact of the Andhra lobbying. The outrage over the ToR is now gathering speed in the students and only yesterday 15 MLAs from the region tendered their resignations. With pressure mounting on the other MLAs from the Telangana public, especially the students, the Andhra plutocrats decided to ‘act’ in a pre-emptive action and label the students ‘Taliban’ in line with their earlier propaganda. The Telugu Media for the last few weeks have been ‘obedient’ accommodating all Telangana news, including massive rallies/meetings, within bottom scrolls. So the time too is right for those in power but unfortunately couple of channels still were around in the campus and tried to film the Police attack on students. The police may be didn’t have time to talk to their handlers on how to handle press. Or maybe simply they didn’t care. So ‘treated’ them too. Even as something as major as this is happening, only those 2-3 attacked channels are reporting the OU events live while others are going ahead with their song and dance routine. But for these channels, we wouldn’t have known how the police themselves turned troublemakers. Instead we would have heard many more cock-and-bull stories about Telangana Taliban. Not that I am underestimating the creativity of our Andhra plutocrats. After all, they brainwashed millions of Andhras to believe in their non-existent ‘linguistic purity’ and ‘ethnic superiority’ by writing their versions of history. So as it dawns here in Samaikyandrapradesh, we may very well see news stories in their mouthpieces about how the OU Taliban cornered the police in the campus for 5 hours and beat them up, and new expert ideas about how to handle these student thugs!

Even as I post this, police is still not allowing maintaining the blockade over the university and refusing entry for doctors and ambulances to treat the injured students inside. As of now, we hear 1 girl student lost eye-sight, 40 students including JAC leaders, 6 Journos got injured. Visuals showed police vandalising private property and media property within campus. Even members of ruling Congress this is a Govt’s conspiracy. A 10 member committee has been constituted by the State Human Rights Commission and they are now on their way to campus. Th commission’s earlier orders in last 2 months have been violated casually. Now, it should consider itself lucky if they are allowed inside the campus!

(Source : The Argumentative Indian.blogspot.com)

1. To examine the situation in the State of Andhra Pradesh with reference to the demand for a separate State of Telangana as well as the demand for maintaining the present status of a united Andhra Pradesh.
2. To review the developments in the State since its formation and their impact on the progress and development of the different regions of the State.
3. To examine the impact of the recent developments in the State on the different sections of the people such as women, children, students, minorities, other backward classes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
4. To identify the key issues that must be addressed while considering the matters mentioned in items (1), (2) and (3) above.
5. To consult all sections of the people, especially the political parties, on the aforesaid matters and elicit their views; to seek from the political parties and other organisations a range of solutions that would resolve the present difficult situation and promote the welfare of all sections of the people; to identify the optimal solutions for this purpose; and to recommend a plan of action and a road map.
6. To consult other organisations of civil society such as industry, trade, trade unions, farmers’ organisations, women’s organisations and students’ organisations on the aforesaid matters and elicit their views with specific reference to the all round development of the different regions of the State.
7. To make any other suggestion or recommendation that the Committee may deem appropriate.

The Committee is requested to submit its report by December 31, 2010.

* * *

(Source: Press Information Bureau)

Telangana festival Bathukamma

- Madhavi Tata

Political agitations that drag on and on fall into a set groove—usually, one tired rally after another, with a flagging media attendance. Not Telangana, where the fight for statehood refuses to be monochromatic, and is expressing itself in a riot of colours. The violence that raged across the 10 districts of Telangana in December has given way to a burst of innovation and colloquial creativity. From cooking on national highways to planting paddy on the roads, from washing clothes on the streets to weaving saris on a moving tractor, there is never a dull moment in T-land.

In Amanagallu in Mahbubnagar district, indoctrination is in full swing—village leaders have established a Telangana school, where students are given lessons on the movement’s history. One zilla parishad school in Adilabad district even hosted a daylong ‘election’, in which nearly a thousand people voted on the question of statehood for Telangana. No prizes for guessing the results.

Telangana ideologues like Professor K. Jayashankar calls this the genius of the common man at work. “Strikes, rallies and seminars are the usual ways to generate awareness in political agitations across India,” he says. “The citizens of Telangana are devising a new format for expressing their views peacefully. It heralds a new maturity in the movement.”

Women cook food on a Sircilla roadside

Describing how a TV crew from Delhi filmed, fascinated, as people in his constituency cooked and ate on the road, Sircilla MP K.T. Rama Rao (son of TRS chief K. Chandrasekhara Rao), explains: “These are not gimmicks. This is about finding novel ways to sustain a long-drawn battle so that the cause does not go unnoticed by decision-makers at the Centre.” Sometimes it takes a provocative form, with young people kicking around footballs painted with the faces of politicians perceived as anti-Telangana, like Jagan Mohan Reddy, Lagadapati Rajagopal and even chief minister K. Rosaiah.

Singer and poet Balakishan Rasamayi, the convenor of the Telangana Dhoom Dhaam Committee, one of the mini-cultural outfits that have sprung up now, says the football games are a message to politicians opposing the T-state: “We will not take things lying down. We will play football with you if you crush our hopes and desires for statehood.”

The most creative are the football games in which politicians who are anti-Telangana are painted on the footballs.

So it goes on, a playful mix of protest and creativity. At Mustabad, people make ‘Jai Telangana’ rubber seals and stamp them on currency notes. Barbers hand out free haircuts at Ilendu in Khammam district. Women roll beedis on a road in Dilavarpur, Adilabad district, obstructing traffic for two hours. Washerwomen stage Chakirevu (a clothes-washing fair) at Girnibavi village in Warangal while other protesters wash clothes with gusto right on the highway at Ramakrishnapuram in Adilabad. They call it a “cleansing ritual”. Students sweep roads and sell vegetables at Ibrahimpatnam, Rangareddy district. Their counterparts in Mahbubnagar walk on their knees.

“None of these ideas are coming from political parties,” stresses Rama Rao. Another T-protagonist, Prof Kodanda Ram, feels the movement has taken on a more spontaneous form this time, compared to 1969, when it was more “idealistic”. (Of course, there were also no TV cameras then.)

ABVP men plant paddy in Dichpally

Congressmen favouring a united Andhra beg to differ. “The students are being brainwashed,” says MP Sabbam Hari dismissively. “The poor, especially coolies and daily-wage labourers, are impacted the most because thanks to these agitations, there is no work for them.” But the agitators are unabashed by such criticism. “We will bring the lawmakers to their knees,” says a confident Bullikonda Veerendra, a student leader from Warangal. The fun has just begun at this T-party. The question is, with a decision on statehood nowhere in sight, how long can it be sustained?

(Source: OutLook India)

(Courtesy: The National)

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2008, I found myself standing in a concrete building set amid a patchwork of agricultural fields on the outskirts of Armoor, a town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The building had a grand title, Garden City Function Hall, but apart from its bleak rural surroundings – the vegetation blasted dull yellow by months without rain – there was little to distinguish it from countless such structures in India that are regularly rented out for weddings and celebrations. As waiters dressed in jeans, vests and shoes without socks circulated with glasses of water, a man with long hair and a thick moustache began singing, his right hand sometimes pressed to his heart and sometimes swept out in the hope of stirring people from their midday torpor. A chorus line of young boys, bare-chested and in white dhotis, danced behind the singer, occasionally breaking out in a sheepish refrain of “Jai Telangana!” – “Victory to Telangana”.

The singers were demanding the formation of a new state called Telangana, an area of some 155,400 square km to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth-largest state. The hundred-odd people at the gathering, from farmers with calloused hands to lawyers with video cameras, were there to support this demand, as was R Limbadri, a professor at Osmania University in Hyderabad, who had grown up in a nearby village and had brought me to the event. Limbadri was a Dalit, a member of the lowest Hindu caste, and he was far less dramatic than the singer when he addressed the crowd. He supported statehood, he said, but only if Telangana was formed as a different kind of state, one truly committed to ending the incredible economic disparity that has troubled Andhra Pradesh in recent years.

I liked Limbadri’s speech, but I doubted that it had much impact. The gathering seemed to be without definition, lacking leaders or even a plan of action, and all I picked up in the afternoon heat was a faint expectation that the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti (TRS), a political party formed in 2001 on a pro-statehood platform, would do well enough in the next elections to exert political pressure in Delhi. Yet when India went to the polls last April, the TRS performed very poorly, losing three of its five seats in the national parliament and 16 of the 26 seats it held in the state assembly.

But the election debacle did not mark the end of Telangana. Last November, a TRS politician named K Chandrasekhara Rao began a hunger strike, claiming that he would not eat until Delhi agreed to a separate state. As Rao’s condition deteriorated and he was moved into a hospital in Hyderabad, large crowds across Telangana began demonstrating in his favour. India has a long tradition of statehood movements employing pressure tactics, from hunger strikes and demonstrations to armed insurgency. But when these tactics succeed, they typically do so only in the wake of protracted negotiations. Perhaps this explains why the Telangana protests drew little nationwide attention – until the central government, 11 days into Rao’s fast, unexpectedly announced that it had agreed to his demands. It would begin the process of creating Telangana, the first new state since 2000, by combining Hyderabad, the area’s biggest city, with nine rural districts surrounding it.

In Andhra Pradesh, Delhi’s acquiescence triggered celebrations among Telangana supporters, but it also sparked counter-protests. More than half of the state’s assembly members threatened to resign, local Congress leaders standing to lose influence denounced their colleagues in Delhi, and business leaders and media outlets across India began an outcry that Telangana would destroy “Brand Hyderabad”, which in recent years has become a symbol of India’s success at soaking up information-technology jobs outsourced from the West. Faced with such opposition, the central government began stalling, calling inconclusive meetings even as heated protests and strikes were held by supporters and opponents alike. The agitation was particularly severe in Telangana, where buses have been burnt and shops attacked; in Hyderabad, students at Osmania University announced that they would prevent New Year’s Eve celebrations at the city’s upscale hotels and clubs.

From a distance, such reactions can seem like hysteria. Indeed, Telangana’s supporters have been portrayed in urban media outlets as irrational and sectarian, driven by nothing more than an unjustified desire to seize Hyderabad’s wealth for themselves. But the students at Osmania are mostly from rural, low-caste backgrounds, and their anger at the affluent urbanites partaking of Hyderabad’s expensive nightlife is genuine. The Telangana crisis has not come out of thin air: it has a deep basis in an increasing divide in Andhra Pradesh between urban growth based on technology and real estate – “Brand Hyderabad” – and increasing deprivation in the drought-prone countryside.

********************************

Telangana, which radiates out from Hyderabad, sits on the Deccan Plateau, its flat landscape marked by black volcanic rocks. In colonial times it was part of Hyderabad state and was ruled by local kings known as Nizams, who themselves were under the control of an official appointed by the British Empire. The last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, was the wealthiest man in the world, but he was also incompetent and repressive, and in 1946, his peasants began a communist-led rebellion against him. Two years later, while trying to avoid joining either India or Pakistan, the Nizam was deposed by Indian troops. The peasant rebellion continued against the new Indian government, to be crushed in 1951. Five years later – after a hunger strike by a local leader who died demanding a new state for all Telugu-speaking people – Andhra Pradesh was created by merging the Nizam’s territories with neighbouring areas that were previously part of Madras state.

The new state combined three disparate regions. There was coastal Andhra, which looked out to the Bay of Bengal and was relatively well-off; there was poorer Rayalaseema, landlocked except for a small corner touching the sea; and there was Telangana – literally “land of the Telugu speakers” – landlocked, rebellious, cosmopolitan and the poorest of the three. The merger only accentuated the differences. People from coastal Andhra rose to dominant positions in politics and business, and from 1969 to 1970, the state witnessed a violent agitation for a separate Telangana. This was followed, from the 1970s onward, by left-wing armed movements engaged in a class war that drew sustenance from the inequality evident in the countryside, particularly in Telangana, where the Maoists were dominant.

By the turn of the century, however, these failed agitations had begun to look insignificant, marginalised by the highly publicised transformation of Hyderabad from an elegant but old-fashioned city into a global metropolis that hosted companies like Microsoft, Dell and Google and served as the headquarters of Satyam, the fourth-largest software company in India. The man responsible for these changes was N Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh from 1995 to 2004, and the leader of the Telugu Desam party. Naidu was from Rayalaseema, but his domestic support came from wealthy farmers and businessmen from coastal Andhra. Internationally, he found allies in the West – at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Britain’s Department for International Development. Naidu also took on the Maoists, alternating between initiating talks and escalating security operations against them; by the end of his tenure, he had put them on the defensive.

The pacification of the countryside and the booming of Hyderabad, a section of which Naidu renamed Cyberabad, was in keeping with his vision of making Andhra Pradesh modern. In the late 1990s, he had hired the American consulting firm McKinsey to prepare a policy paper called Andhra Vision 2020. The paper recommended a significantly smaller role for the government; the winding down of projects for the poor, especially in rural areas; and generous incentives for private businesses. If such an approach was followed, the McKinsey report said, it would ensure that by the year 2020, “poverty will have been eradicated and current inequalities will have disappeared”.

********************************

It doesn’t take long after entering rural Telangana to see the effects of Naidu’s policies. A week after I had attended the statehood rally, I returned to Armoor on a bus from Hyderabad, the malls, condominiums and private engineering colleges giving way to women sowing rice, humped bulls ploughing muddy furrows, and farmers spraying pesticides. The land was gently undulating, filled with palm trees, cacti and rocks.

It looked picturesque, but I was entering the site of a vast suicide epidemic that stretched through Telangana, westward across the state border into the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra (which, not coincidentally, has its own statehood demands) and north into Chattisgarh, where Maoist squads are locked in battle with a repressive state regime. These are the three areas most affected by the farmer suicides that have plagued India since 1995, with nearly 200,000 farmers killing themselves in response to fluctuating crop prices and high levels of debt. Naidu was voted out in 2004, replaced by an ostensibly more progressive Congress chief minister who had promised to create new irrigation projects. But the only visible difference was the presence of posters advertising suicide helplines on the backs of buses.

In Armoor, there was no sign of prosperity other than two white mansions rising out of the flat scrubland. They belonged to seed dealers, middlemen who both supplied seeds and purchased crops, activities once managed by government agencies until Naidu implemented the McKinsey reforms. The seed dealers had become powerful and affluent under the new arrangement, but not without friction. Both buildings, I discovered as I drew closer, were gutted, their white walls scorched with fire, the doors and windows gaping holes in their façades, the wooden frames transformed into charcoal.

I was being shown around by Devaram, a wiry, abrasive man who was an organiser with a local Maoist group that has abandoned armed struggle for traditional electoral politics. Devaram had grown up an “untouchable” in a nearby village. By the time he was 10, he was working in the fields as a labourer for 18 to 20 hours a day, and he had become a communist. He had seen comrades killed by the police, fled to Hyderabad, worked in construction in the Gulf and been deported for organising a strike there. He was a self-described troublemaker and enjoyed telling me how the mansions were set on fire.

It was a complicated story, involving a rivalry between the two dealers who owned the mansions. The bigger dealer had asked 25,000 farmers in the area to grow red sorghum seeds, offering them a generous price. He had placed such a large order that he would need a bank loan to pay the farmers, but he expected to make a substantial profit selling the seeds in northern India, where they were in demand as animal feed.

After the farmers harvested the seeds, however, he refused to pay. The other dealer had deliberately sold red sorghum at a low price, bringing down the rate. The farmers, who found themselves without money to buy material for the autumn crop, the most important one of the year, began hunger strikes and started demonstrating outside the district collector’s office.

Finally, one June morning, around 10,000 farmers gathered in Armoor. They converged on one dealer’s mansion, having set fire to three government jeeps on the way. The dealer did not live in the house, and the farmers allowed the tenants to leave before torching it. The police began shooting, and one man got a bullet in his ribs, but the crowd forced the police to retreat. Then they set fire to the mansion owned by the other dealer before gathering on the motorway and blocking traffic for the rest of the day.

********************************

A few days after meeting Devaram, I travelled to Hasakothur, the village from where some of the rampaging farmers had come. There I met Gopeti Rajeshwar, a stocky man with cropped hair who had taken part in the protests. He was adamant that the actual burning of the mansions had been carried out by thugs hired by the rival dealers. (When I asked the dealers about this later, they too blamed each other more than the farmers.) Rajeshwar said that he had chosen to grow red sorghum because of the price offered and because it required relatively little water, which was one of his biggest concerns.

We walked in the late afternoon heat through fields of soybeans, wheat and turmeric, past a teenage boy carefully tapping toddy from a palm tree, and stopped in front of a depression overgrown with weeds. “That’s a water tank,” Rajeshwar said. “It’s been dry for 10 years.” Like most of his fellow farmers, he depended on an electrical pump called a borewell to access the groundwater. Borewells are expensive, around 50,000 rupees (Dh3,995) each; the firms that dig the necessary holes charge 150 rupees (Dh11) per foot, and often make a dozen exploratory attempts, each 250 feet deep, before hitting water. Most farmers take loans from moneylenders to finance their borewells; Rajeshwar had avoided debt by working in construction in Dubai for two years; after paying 50,000 rupees to the middleman who had set him up with the job, he had just enough to buy a borewell.

Our conversation continued as we walked back to the village square, where an emaciated older man interrupted us, saying: “He’s not telling you how bad things really are.” Rajeshwar laughed. “There’s no point going into too many details,” he said. The man, a tailor named Janardan, had worked in Saudi Arabia for five years. In 2007, he sent his son to Dubai after paying a middleman 80,000 rupees (Dh 6,393) to get him a job there. With a year of the high interest charged by a private moneylender, he was now 100,000 rupees in debt. I asked Janardan how much money he made as a tailor. He looked sourly at Rajeshwar: “They never have any money for new clothes,” he said. “My wife makes 500 rupees (Dh40) a month from rolling beedis. We live on that.”

********************************

The details of Rajeshwar’s life are part of a larger pattern. The lack of water in Telangana, where irrigation tanks and canals have been silted over and the aquifers are being depleted by the overuse of borewells, is one of the major grievances cited by those demanding a separate state. Meanwhile, the debt incurred by farmers, the volatility of crop prices created by the speculation of seed dealers, and the absence of government support has created a situation in which the rural population can no longer survive through agriculture.

As a result, millions of people from Telangana move to the Gulf states and to Indian cities in search of work. Nine of its ten districts are classified as “backward” or extremely poor by the Indian government. Even when the government provides subsidies for industries, as it did in Mahbubnagar district in the 1980s, the owners employ workers from other states who are too insecure and transient to even think of forming unions. Today, even Mahbubnagar sends two-thirds of its adult population, nearly a million people, to work elsewhere, mostly as construction labourers.

Telangana is not alone in experiencing such deprivation – the Rayalaseema region, for example, shares many of its characteristics and challenges. If Telangana has become a movement, it is in part because of its conscious history of difference, from its fluency in Hindi (a legacy of the Nizam’s administration) to its long history of agitations, including the Maoist rebellions, which remain a significant factor in the current upheaval. Today, the Maoists (whose chief, Mupalla Laxman Rao, better known as Comrade Ganpathy, was a schoolteacher in the Karimnagar district of Telangana in the early 1970s) support the idea of a separate state, which helps the opponents of Telangana paint the movement as nothing more than a Maoist front that seeks a separate state only in the service of radical class warfare. The initial willingness in Delhi to create Telangana, meanwhile, seems to have had some basis in the idea that a new state might actually reduce support for the Maoists, perhaps by channelling more funds to the area and creating a local elite that profits from this arrangement. The central government may also have been looking back to 2000, when the creation of the states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh put in place new regimes that were willing to be far more brutal than their predecessors in battling the Maoists.

All these strategies and accusations – which revolve around an underground group generally portrayed as irrelevant to the new, globalising India – reveal the degree to which that globalising project is in crisis in Andhra Pradesh. It is no coincidence that the struggle over the state’s future arrives at a time when many of Hyderabad’s booms turn out to have been bubbles. The good years that favoured the coastal Andhra elite now seem to have been packed with projects built on shifting sand.

The crisis started last January with the revelation of massive accounting fraud at Satyam, the software company, and the resignation of its chairman, Ramalinga Raju. Although Satyam had been sold off by the Indian government and Raju was in jail when I visited Hyderabad last August, the fallout had spread to Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties, companies owned by Raju’s sons. The building of a subway system in Hyderabad, a project granted to Maytas Infra, had come to a halt because the company had no money, and all that existed of the project were the virtual subway stops still visible on Hyderabad’s Google map. In Mahbubnagar, I spoke to the manager of a steel factory that was one of Maytas Infra’s suppliers. He was facing losses because of the stalled subway project; Maytas Infra, which had no cash, had paid him off with four unfinished villas in a development owned by Maytas Properties.

It was astonishing to hear of this sort of barter economy operating underneath the sheen of Brand Hyderabad. But people I met in the city constantly reminded me that appearances were deceptive: that Maytas was simply Satyam spelt backwards, a double of sorts for the more famous company, and that the boom had been about real estate, not software. Indeed, just before admitting to his role in the Satyam fraud, Raju Senior had tried to push through the acquisition of the Maytas companies by Satyam, apparently because he knew that Maytas projects would stall and he hoped to pass the losses on to his Satyam shareholders while extricating his sons.

********************************

One morning, I met up with P Sivakumar, or Siva, a man who owned an incomplete house in an unfinished 75-acre development near Cyberabad called Maytas Hill County. The drive there took us past the grey Satyam tower and the white Microsoft campus, the horizon crowded with giant yellow cranes standing in silent prayer over building shells. In the distance, on a rising stretch of land, were large letters spelling out the development’s name, carefully arranged to look like the iconic Hollywood sign.

Siva was in his thirties, with a small paunch and dark circles around his eyes. He was born in Ananthapur district in coastal Andhra, but he was also a new kind of floating citizen created by the globalising forces unleashed across India in the past two decades. Siva had been a computer programmer in Hyderabad until the late 1990s, when Duncan Goenka, an Indian company, sent him to work for its software division in the United States. He lived there for a decade, mostly in Edison, New Jersey. He made money, got married to a woman from coastal Andhra and, soon after he became an American citizen, moved back to India because he didn’t want his daughter to pick up American cultural norms. “Once you have the US passport, you’re not tied down. You can go back to the US if you need to,” he said.

“And you don’t feel hampered not having an Indian passport while living here?” I asked.

“See, we’re from here,” he answered. “We know how to work this system, and you don’t really need an Indian passport for that.”

We pulled up in front of Siva’s house, which he had bought for 8.5 million rupees (Dh679,325). It was a two-storied unpainted structure with a sloping roof and a small front lawn that looked out at a street full of houses just like it. The only difference was in the degree to which each was finished. The first few houses were almost complete, the next few half-done; at the very end, they were just blocks of grey concrete. A 13-storey apartment building loomed in the distance, but here the narrative was vertical, since Maytas had run out of money after completing the third floor. (Elsewhere on the same property, an 85-acre “Special Economic Zone” had been set up with tax breaks and exemptions from labour laws that were intended to encourage the creation of manufacturing jobs. But all Maytas had done there was dig a vast pit in the ground.)

A couple of the other Maytas Hill County owners came over when they saw Siva. There was a woman in salwar kameez and trainers (“from Dallas, Texas”) and a man on a little scooter (“from Virginia”). They told me they had organised demonstrations outside the house of one of the Raju scions, demanding the completion of their villas. At the same time, they had hired their own workers to make their residences habitable so that they could move in as soon as possible. Siva explained the sense of urgency while showing me around the inside of his house. He and his prospective neighbours believed that, just before being found guilty, Raju senior had illegally transferred money from Satyam to Maytas – 3 trillion rupees (Dh240 million) routed through an offshore account in Mauritius – and they were afraid that the government would seize Maytas Hill County. The development’s hopeful residents believed that if they moved in before then they would have a better chance of holding onto their properties.

In the meantime, Siva said, they would have to do without the promised facilities. There was no swimming pool, no tennis court, no movie theatre and no 56-acre clubhouse. More to the point, there was no water treatment plant, and tankers drove in periodically to fill private reservoirs, workers chasing after them with plastic bottles. There was electricity, but it was a commercial line charging a higher than average rate.

As we stood near a crooked “Emergency Assembly Point” sign, Siva talked about his reasons for buying a house in Maytas Hill County. “We wanted to live with people like ourselves, Andhra people but with an NRI [non-resident Indian] background, so that we could have some of the US lifestyle element. Out there, in the rest of Hyderabad, it’s all so messy.”

It would, of course, become even messier in a few months, when Delhi approved a separate Telangana and the agitations began. Even though the Maytas Hill County owners and the Telangana supporters could not be more different, it is easy now to see how similar their motivations are: both groups want to live with people like themselves and take possession of what they believe to be theirs. Ten years before Andhra Vision 2020 is set to mature, everyone understands that there is no such thing as perpetual growth, that there is not enough to go around, and that the only certainty is the increasingly mad scramble for diminishing wealth, water and land.

• Click here for Telangana JAC Dharna Photos on picasa
• Courtesy: Dileep Konatham

Nizams Letter to the United Nations (U.N) dated 23rd & response by UN on 30th September 1948 regarding the issue of Hyderabad State (which include 10 districts of present Telangana).

• Courtesy: United Nations Archives

HYDERABAD, India — In the middle of the University of Hyderabad’s expansive campus is a large, haphazard tent, pitched precariously with sticks and rope. On a weekday afternoon, about 25 graduate students sit cross-legged on a dirty rug, talking among themselves. They shoot challenging glances at passers-by, half daring, half inviting them to come inside. They’re protesting, and they want the world to know it.

These students, members of the Joint Action Committee, want only one thing — the creation of a new state in south India called Telangana. They’ve been on a “relay fast” for over a month now, sharing the burden of a hunger strike between about 500 students.

“Our only, only, only demand is to form a separate Telangana state as soon as possible,” said Upendar Gundala, a Ph.D. student studying English translation. “This is the end for our everything. Until the state formation, we will be continuing relay fasting.”

Telanganans have long felt oppressed and exploited by Andhra, a much wealthier neighboring region south of Telangana. The feelings have often spilled over into violence, and in 1969, 400 people died in Telangana-related violence.

After India’s independence from Britain, the nation was divided into 28 states based on language. Andhra Pradesh, a southern state on the Bay of Bengal, was created for the Telugu-speaking people. The state is divided into three regions: Andhra on the eastern coast, Rayalaseema in the south, and Telangana in the northwest. Separatists argue that Telangana remains poor — nine of Telangana’s 10 districts are considered backward and so underdeveloped that they qualify for government aid — while the upper-caste people in Andhra enjoy a flourishing agricultural economy.

Since 1956, when Andhra and Telangana merged, Telangana has gotten the short end of the stick in terms of natural resources, funding and representation in government , separatists complain. Though two major rivers have their sources in Telangana, irrigation projects divert the precious water to other areas, they say.

“There are a number of arguments that support in favor of Telangana, but no argument has been stated for a united Andhra,” said Vulli Dhanaraju, a graduate student and member of the Joint Action Committee. “The only argument: They are all speaking Telugu, Telugu, Telugu.”

The government of India announced on Dec. 9 that it would begin the process of forming Telangana. The decision came during the indefinite hunger strike by Kalvakuntla Chandhrashekar Rao, president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi political party. The government did not set a timetable for creation of the new state, which has led south-Indian youth in the capital city of Hyderabad to strike, protest, march and create “bandhs” — road blocks and business closures.

“You suddenly find students participating in these political activities, giving a lot of their time, putting a lot of effort,” said Dr. A. Vijay, an economics professor at the University of Hyderabad and JAC member. “In that sense it is a huge revival of the spirit of students’ activity.”

Though several students at the University of Hyderabad have been participating in the pro-Telangana movement, students at Osmania University have been its main impetus. Osmania, a state-run school nearly 30 km from the University of Hyderabad, has about 250,000 students. It has held massive JAC demonstrations during the past month, often with thousands of students.

Most demonstrations have been non-violent. “There was a huge mobilization of students at the Osmania campus, and that happened quite peacefully,” said Vijay. “On the whole, I think it has been an extremely mature movement and in a way a historical turning point.”

Non-Telugu students are also feeling the tensions in the city and at school. Aparna, a 21-year-old student, has been here for over three years studying economics. Even as an upperclassman, she has resolved to stay on campus and out of the city. “I’ve been inside and safe,” she said. “We’ve been trying to avoid it, especially because we’re not localites.”

She says she sees both sides of the issue, but she is apprehensive about what will happen if the state is formed and she questions whether political leaders will carry out their promises. “I don’t completely support, neither do I completely go against,” she said. “I’ve not been a part of the oppressed.”

Leaders from both sides are currently meeting in Delhi to decide the fate of Telangana. In the meantime, Telangana locals are watching, waiting, and fasting — all while rallying as many supporters as they can.

“All sections of the Telangana people are participating in the movement,” said Dhanaraju. “Irrespective of their caste, religion, their culture and everything, all communities have been participating.”

And for members of the JAC at the University of Hyderabad, the makeshift tent in the center of campus continues to be the hub of their revolution. For students like Gundala, forming the new state has taken precedent even over their studies. “We’ll do our best,” he said. “We have been doing, and we will continue doing until they declare Telangana a state.”

(Courtesy: Politics Daily)

Nizams Letter to the United Nations (U.N) 1

Nizams Letter to the United Nations (U.N) 2

Excerpts (Courtesy http://telanganahistory.blogspot.com/) :

… Meanwhile Laik Ali was pressing that the Hyderabad issue should be taken to the United Nations Organization. On 17 August, he wrote to Nehru that Hyderabad had decided to solicit the good offices of the United Nations Organization in order that the dispute between Hyderabad and India might be resolved and a peaceful and enduring settlement arrived at.

The Indian Government did not agree that Hyderabad had any right in international law to seek the intervention of the United Nations Organization or any other outside body for the settlement of the issue. And that as the Government of India regarded the Indo-Hyderabad dispute as a purely domestic one, they did not recognize the Nizam’s claim to invoke the good offices of the United Nations in that connation.

The below given are the detailed notes on the history of Ancient,medieval ,modern period of the Telangana region and also the freedom struggle, Razakar Movement and The separate Telangana agitation.

Telangana on Google Maps

Google updates Telangana on its Maps,

click here to visit Google maps

No of Districts:
Seema – 4
Andhra – 9
Telangana – 10

No of Schools :
Andhra : 26800
Seema :13001
Telangana: 17594

Investment on Education:
Andhra : 1308 Crores
Seema : 382 Crores
Telangana : 163 Crores

No of Junior Colleges:
Andhra: 270
Seema : 140
Telangana: 176

No of Civil Service Jobs:
Seema : 44
Andhra : 213
Telangana : 67

No of Judges:
Andhra : 84
Seema : 15
Telangana : 39

No of degree Colleges:
Andhra: 170
Seema : 70
Telangana : 74

No of Lecturers:
Telangana : 66040
Seema : 40552
Andhra : 90435

Govt. Jobs:
SeemAndhra – 9,00,000
Telangana – 3,00,000

Medical colleges:
Andhra : 4
Seema : 4
Telangana :3

Medical Hospitals:
Andhra – 663
Seema – 305
Telangana – 270

55 Years struggle ~So the reason TELANGANA STATES~

The National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) of the UPA Government in the previous term contained a paragraph on Telangana which read: “The UPA Government will consider the demand for the formation of a Telangana State at an appropriate time after due consultations and consensus.”

Major political parties in Andhra Pradesh contested the 2009 Assembly elections on manifestos that, in one manner or other, declared support for the formation of a separate State of Telangana.

On December 7, 2009 the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh convened a meeting of the floor leaders of the political parties in the State Legislature. All political parties, except the CPI(M), supported the proposal to adopt a resolution in the State Assembly for creation of Telangana. The CPI(M) referred to the stand taken by the party before the Committee headed by Shri Pranab Mukherjee. The MIM observed that the proper forum to express its views was the Legislative Assembly. The minutes of the meeting were received by the Central Government on December 8, 2009. After considering the minutes, the Central Government decided to initiate the process of forming the State of Telangana. On December 9, 2009, it was announced that ‘an appropriate resolution will be moved’ in the State Assembly. I would like to highlight the key words in that statement: they are ‘process’, ‘appropriate resolution’ and ‘moved’. In the background of the minutes of the all party meeting, I would like to ask, “What was wrong with that statement?”

However, following the announcement, major political parties in Andhra Pradesh witnessed deep divisions among their members, especially MPs and MLAs. It was obvious that the situation had altered. The Government tried its best to bridge the differences. Unfortunately, there was no agreement and it was felt that there was a need to hold further consultations with all political parties and groups in Andhra Pradesh. Hence, another statement was made on behalf of the Central Government on December 23, 2009 emphasizing the need for ‘wide ranging consultations’ and promising to ‘take steps to involve all concerned in the process.” I do not understand why this was described by the media as a flip-flop. There was no flip-flop on the part of the Central Government. Government was simply responding to the altered situation as a result of divisions in the political parties.

Yesterday, the Central Government decided to convene a meeting of the leaders of the eight recognized political parties in Andhra Pradesh. The meeting is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, January 5, 2010.

By Lalita Iyer & Soni Mishra

In the run-up to the creation of Andhra Pradesh, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had not been particularly happy with the idea of merging Telangana with the Andhra region, saying it had a “tint of expansionist imperialism”. Nehru later compared the merger, which happened on November 1, 1956, to a marriage that has provisions for divorce if the two parties are unable to get along. The marriage has been a tumultuous one and the ‘divorce petition’ very violent.

It is a given that no work will be done in Andhra Pradesh till a decision is taken on Telangana. While almost all MLAs, MPs and ministers from the region have submitted their resignation, the babus are too busy speculating and so no files are moving. A big loss for the common man.

In the current scenario, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and its leader K. Chandrasekhar Rao, who started the present fight, have lost their importance. As all political parties together formed the joint action committee, Rao is merely another leader there. The committee selected Prof. K. Kodandaram as its head. This means that the Telangana movement is now in the hands of students from Osmania and Kakatiya universities. The movement can go any way, provided the Centre makes the right decision.

It is rumoured that the Centre has achieved what it wanted to—the political annihilation of N. Chandrababu Naidu, chief of the Telugu Desam Party. It is no mean task, as the TDP has a strong cadre base, has been around for 25 years and was in power for 17 years. Naidu himself was chief minister for nine years. But now, the Rayalaseema region will not accept him and coastal Andhra sees him as weak and succumbing to pressure. However, the 39 TDP MLAs from the Telangana region said come what may, Naidu will continue to be their leader.

Another political opponent of the Congress, actor Chiranjeevi and his Praja Rajyam Party, too, has been almost wiped out. The PRP’s huge following in Telangana was lost when Chiru called for a united Andhra Pradesh. The party was never strong in coastal Andhra.

But the main achievement of the Congress is that Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, son of late chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, has been reined in. He stands no chance of becoming chief minister and even the most vocal MLAs supporting him have been gagged. Jagan was accused of fomenting the anti-Telangana agitation that swept through coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions. Apparently, his role in the agitation has been conveyed to the party high command.

It is clear that all resignations are symbolic as no ruling politician wants a re-election now. So the next big showdown is the ‘Telangana Garjana’ to be held by students at the Osmania University Arts College on January 3. The state had initially refused permission for the meeting, but later allowed it. Apparently, the state is hoping that the Centre will make an announcement on Telangana before the meeting.

Currently, buses are shy of plying between the regions and the underlying tension is leading to monetary loss for small-time players. Already rumours are rife that many IT companies are thinking of shifting base to Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. And till a decision is taken on the bifurcation, no investment will be made in Andhra or Telangana. In Hyderabad, real estate prices have dropped and the continuous tension is not allowing businesses to flourish. Watching with apprehension and curiosity, Muslims of Hyderabad wonder if they will have any say in the future of the city ruled by the Nizams.

Meanwhile, the Centre is trying to sort out the confusion caused by the contradictory statements issued by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram on December 9 and 23, 2009. Andhra Pradesh Information and Public relations Minister J. Geeta Reddy said: “There is confusion after the second statement. Especially, the use of the words wide-ranging consultations [on Telangana formation] has given rise to confusion. There is vagueness about the Congress stand on the issue. We have to be clear about when the process will start and about its time-frame.” Reddy is among the 13 pro-Telangana ministers who have tendered their resignations to Congress president Sonia Gandhi following the December 23 statement.

“We cannot go back on the issue of Telangana statehood. We are very confident that the government will come out with a clarification and start the process,” said state Irrig-ation Minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah.

While the state leaders want a time-bound programme, the Congress high command wants the situation to calm down before the process can be started. State Congress leaders feel they should have been consulted before any decision was taken. They are peeved that other parties are taking credit for the Telangana campaign, while the decisive step was taken by the Congress-led UPA. So the leaders continue to be defiant ?and refuse to withdraw their resignations despite being asked by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Apparently, the Congress has now agreed with the argument of its pro-Telangana Congress leaders about not letting other parties run away with credit. But the pro-Telangana leaders have been asked to ensure that the agitation does not go out of hand. The state Congress leaders are opposed to the joint action committee’s plan to organise a series of bandhs.

The Centre’s quick decision on Telangana is understood to have been guided by the apprehension that the unrest would be exploited ?by Maoists. The Congress, traditionally favouring a separate Telangana state, had contested the 2004 Lok Sabha as well as Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh in an alliance with the TRS, promising statehood for the Telangana region. The entire episode has also put the spotlight on the K. Rosaiah regime and it is being said that YSR, who staunchly opposed a separate Telangana, would not have allowed the agitation to grow. There has been speculation about a change of guard in the state government, but the Congress high command is learnt to be fully backing Rosaiah.

With January 3 looming closer, the Congress leadership may announce a time-bound mechanism for consultations and this could be a ministerial committee. The committee would talk out the issue and buy time to let tempers cool. A States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) appears unlikely, as the idea is being opposed by those who are for and against Telangana. A second SRC would also encourage similar demands from Gorkhaland, Bundelkhand and Vidarbha.

(Courtesy:The Week)

The views expressed by the author are personal

Consider these excerpts from a set of essays I have been reading:   

‘The people of Telangana find themselves in an unenviable state. Their fellow countrymen outside the State of Andhra Pradesh, are unable to understand, much less appreciate, the significance of the revolt in Telangana’.

‘The moment Telangana elected representatives dehypnotise themselves from the lure and pressure of the Andhra political bosses, and fall in line with the aspirations of their electors, the movement will reach its natural culmination’.

These words sound wholly of the moment, whereas they come from a book published 40 years ago. In the first weeks of 1969, meetings calling for a separate state were held in towns and villages in Telangana. As a result of the ‘continuously rising tempo of the Telangana movement’, the police came out in force, and ‘lathi-charges, firings and the resultant violence became the accepted way of life in Telangana’.

In response to the crisis, 300 college teachers held a convention at Hyderabad on May 20, 1969. The proceedings of the conference were published in a book, now scarce, entitled The Telangana Movement: An Investigative Focus. I came by my copy on the pavement in Bangalore some years ago — it is time to share it with the world, since, as the excerpts show, it has a strikingly contemporary resonance.

In 1969, as in 2009, the campaign for Telangana was marked by a rhetoric of betrayal. On February 20, 1956, a ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ was signed between the Congress leaders of the Andhra and Telangana regions respectively. This promised that the deputy chief minister of the united state would be from Telangana, that there would be a quota for Telangana people in government jobs, that an influx of Andhras into their territory would not be allowed. The complaint was that these safeguards had not been put in place.

Nor did the charges end here. Thus, while Telangana had 42 per cent of the state’s cultivated area, it was allotted 30 per cent of the state’s expenditure on agriculture, 27 per cent of the allocation of fertilisers and less than its fair share of canal waters and hydel power.

The convention also made the case for Telangana in positive terms. The state would be viable in size; bigger, for example, than West Bengal and Kerala. It would be viable in economic terms; its rates of food production were higher than the national average, and it had excellent mineral resources. More substantially, it would contribute to a deepening of Indian democracy. For ‘smaller states can help [in] democratising our political process, which in turn will attract the larger sections into [the] developmental process…’ Indeed, ‘smaller states may herald a new and promising era in the political and economic life of [the] nation’.

The delegates to the Hyderabad convention met with the Union home minister to press their case. They failed then — now, 40 years later, their successors appear to have succeeded, with the government promising to pass a resolution in the Andhra Pradesh assembly calling for a separate state of Telangana.

In the 1950s, the map of India was redrawn to create states based on language. That process was likewise set in motion by a fast, conducted by Potti Sriramulu, for a separate state of Andhra Pradesh. Sriramulu, like

K. Chandrasekhar Rao, embodied the sentiments of millions of people. Since he was more obscure, and the prime minister of the day more powerful, it took his death (after 58 days without food) and the intensification of the street protests for the Centre to concede the new state. This then led to protests by Kannada, Marathi, and Malayalam speakers, in response to which a States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) was created, which, in 1956, officially mandated the principle of linguistic states.

In retrospect, it is clear that this reorganisation consolidated national unity, such that India did not go the way of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which had to suffer bloody civil wars because of the unwillingness to grant linguistic autonomy. However, our nation-state is comparatively young, and still evolving. It now faces a second generation of challenges, these pertaining to the regional imbalances in social and economic development. A new SRC should be constituted, which would look dispassionately into the demands for Vidarbha, Gorkhaland, Harit Pradesh, Kongu Nadu, and other such. Its mandate should also include the granting of real financial and political autonomy to panchayats and municipalities.

To do its task fairly and honourably, a new SRC must draw its members not from political parties but from the law, the academy, and the social sector. The members of the first SRC were the jurist Fazl Ali, the author and diplomat K.M. Panikkar, and the social worker H.N. Kunzru. India today has a comparable set of distinguished and independent-minded people. Some names for a fresh SRC I might suggest are the jurist Fali Nariman, the economist Jean Dreze, the sociologist André Béteille, and the social worker Ela Bhatt — but there would be others, too.

One hopes the Centre has the courage to redeem a promise first made in the UPA manifesto of 2004 but quietly forgotten since. Meanwhile, expect Jaswant Singh to put aside his pen, thus to answer his constituents’ demand that he make Gorkhaland the sole object of his attentions. Ajit Singh may also be stirred out of his present lethargy to lead the movement for Harit Pradesh. As for Rao, he certainly knows the parallels with the movement in the 1950s for a separate Andhra. Potti Sriramulu’s fast was conducted in Madras; because he lived there, and because he wanted Madras to be the capital of Andhra Pradesh. In the event, Sriramulu’s supporters got their state but not that city. Rao’s greatest fear now must be that history would repeat itself in toto, such that they have their Telangana, but without Hyderabad.

(Courtesy: HindustanTimes)

Protests, road blockades, rallies, processions, meetings, human chains and cultural programmes were organised across the region by all political parties and other pro-Telangana groups.

Tension continued at Osmania University, the nerve centre of the agitation, as students took out a procession to the police station demanding release of their leaders. Police had a tough time controlling the angry students.

The protest was held even as police stepped up efforts to foil the plans of the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the students for a ‘Chalo Hyderabad’ march and rally Jan 3. Police have denied permission for the protests and imposed prohibitory orders in and around the city.

However, the government Tuesday received a jolt with the state high court quashing its order for closure of all university hostels and messes in Telangana. The court directed that the hostels and messes be reopened with necessary measures to prevent the entry of outsiders.

Police went on alert in Hyderabad and other parts of the region a day ahead of the shutdown called by the all-party JAC. Additional forces, including paramilitary personnel, were deployed in the state capital and other towns.

The tussle between students on hunger strike and the police continued on the campuses of all universities in the region, especially the Kakatiya University in Warangal.

Some student unions have threatened to disrupt New Year celebrations at Ramoji Film City on the outskirts of Hyderabad. A group of students staged a protest outside the film city owned by media baron Ramoji Rao.

Hyderabad Police Commissioner B. Parasada Rao has warned of strict action against those planning to disrupt New Year celebrations in the city.

Demanding withdrawal of cases booked against those participating in the agitation, lawyers staged a sit-in outside the Nampally criminal court complex.

In Warangal, students, lawyers and government employees came together to stage massive protests. Lawyers boycotted courts.

In Karimnagar town, hundreds of people marched through the streets demanding the immediate formation of Telangana state. Leaders of all parties vowed not to rest till the central government announced the formation of the state.

Protesters in various towns also used folk songs and cultural performances to highlight their demand.

In Mahabubnagar district, government employees resorted to a ‘pen down’ protest in support of the Telangana movement.

The ‘fast unto death’ and relay hunger strikes by students, lawyers and legislators cutting across party lines also continued.

(Courtesy: Hindustan Times)

Dec 13, 2009: On my visits to Hyderabad, my hometown, I often find myself looking for a CD or DVD of an old, forgotten Telugu movie called Maa Bhoomi. Though I come across a lot of old stuff going back to the ’50s and ’60s, I have never been lucky enough to lay my hands on this relatively recent 1979 movie.
The sudden announcement of the process of forming Telangana state has, however, raised hopes in me that my search for Maa Bhoomi might end soon. In more than one sense, given that Maa Bhoomi means “Our Land” and I am a native of the Telangana region.
Since a major component of the campaign for Telangana statehood was to give our distinct culture the space that is due to it, I am optimistic that Maa Bhoomi, the first and probably the only ever feature film to be made completely in our dialect, will be back in circulation. Whatever little Telangana heritage is available in celluloid form would anyway be precious to us and should now be in greater demand than ever before.
But then, it is not only by default that Maa Bhoomi is so valuable. Though I saw it as a teenager decades ago when it had a long run as a morning show in one cinema hall in Hyderabad, I dare say that I would appreciate it as much even today. I have vivid memories of the movie capturing Telangana life against the backdrop of the armed struggle of the ’40s so powerfully that its obvious communist influence did not seem to detract from its cinematic merit.
Many people of my background grew up feeling defensive about the “crudities” of our dialect because of the manner in which they were run down or derided in the “popular culture” of Andhra Pradesh, defined by the more influential people from coastal districts.
Telugu cinema reflected this bias most blatantly as its heroes and heroines invariably and unmistakably spoke the coastal dialect. If the Telangana dialect made it to those films at all, it was heard from the mouths of villains or comedians.
Maa Bhoomi was, therefore, a liberating and cathartic experience for me, even if there was nothing “heroic” about the protagonist, a lowly peasant, who joins the underground armed struggle because he could anyway do nothing when the local zamindar forced his girlfriend into sex.
I could relate to the smallest of the Telangana peculiarities woven into its narrative: the manner in which the peasantry, for instance, was shown addressing their social superiors with the egalitarian nuvvu (equivalent to the Hindi tu), rather than with the honorific meeru (like aap) apt to be used in coastal Andhra.
Maa Bhoomi made such a lasting impact on me not only because of its cinematic quality but also because it pushed the envelope by letting all its characters speak in the Telangana dialect. Come to think of it, even its songs were in Telangana. One of the stirring songs introduced Gaddar, who went on to become a legendary balladeer.
The language of Maa Bhoomi was a highlight in itself because a distinguished Hyderabadi, Shyam Benegal, had already portrayed the feudal life of the Telangana countryside in his famous 1973 debut film in Hindi, Ankur.
The director of Maa Bhoomi too was a distinguished debutant, but, remarkably, he was not a native of Telangana. It is, perhaps, a measure of the inferiority complex suffered by the natives of Telangana that it took somebody all the way from Bengal, Gautam Ghose, to make this linguistic breakthrough on the silver screen.
Despite the critical and commercial success of this low-budget film made with unknown actors, Maa Bhoomi failed to spawn a genre of Telangana films, although the Telugu film industry went on to earn the distinction of being the most prolific year after year. Its closest successors seemed to be the few films that were made on Hyderabad’s fascination with its diaspora (Hyderabad Blues, Dollar Dreams, Angrez), which were largely either in English or Hyderabadi Urdu (or Dakhni, if you prefer to call it that).
Much of the psychological gains I made from Maa Bhoomi, however, came unstuck a year later when T Anjaiah, a quintessential Telangana speaker, became chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1980 and triggered a whole lot of jokes about our dialect. There was a veritable industry of “Anjaiah jokes” – much in the manner in which a decade later the peculiar dialogue delivery of a yesteryears Hindi film villain from Hyderabad sparked off “Ajit jokes” across the country.
Anjaiah’s predecessors from the Telangana region, P V Narasimha Rao, J Vengala Rao and M Chenna Reddy, escaped such ignominy because they knew Telugu well enough to speak it in a manner that was acceptable to people across the state.
While I chuckled at the Anjaiah jokes and shared them with others, I was conscious that underlying them was a contemptuous rejection of the Telangana dialect by the political mainstream dominated by people from the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions. This is evident even today in the almost total absence of the Telangana dialect from TV news or entertainment channels.
The breakthrough just made on the statehood therefore seems to give an opportunity to Telanganites to come out of the cultural closet. The prospect of having our own state is exciting as it will let us find our voice, speak freely and unabashedly in our own dialect, without looking over the shoulder to see if any “refined” Telugu speaker from coastal Andhra is sniggering at us.
Egalitarian and earthy as the Telangana dialect is, there is an Anjaiah lurking in each of us, however much we may be educated or sophisticated. The revival of the old Hyderabad state will help us rediscover, among other cultural treasures, our Telangana cuisine which is so distinct from the notoriously hot Andhra counterpart.
Since my own rediscovery began with Maa Bhoomi, I fancy that when the history of the Telangana state is written, the influence of this arthouse film over at least my generation will merit more than a footnote. I also sincerely hope that those who administer the new state will take pointers from the film which will help them ensure that it doesn’t turn into Mao Bhoomi instead.

(Courtesy: Times Of India Blogs)

Look at them, they are carrying weapons, attack them

Andhra Politician to the Police: “Look at them, they are carrying weapons, attack them”.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister K.Rossaih has recently said in an interview that his government can not do much about bifurcation of state as it does not come under his purview and the center has to take action on it. It is interesting that Congress party says it supports the demand for separate Telengana. State parties like Telugu Desham has already come out in support of it and BJP raised the issue in the parliament. TRS is already there in Telengana spreading the stir, therefore one does not understand as what stops the government to form a separate state of Telengana if its people, do not want to live under the regime dominated by Andhrite. It is shocking that state government does not want to speak on it. Most of the state which has been carved ouf of their previous states have actually been created when resolution have been passed by the respective assemblies. For Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattishgarh, state assemblies of Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh passed resolutions for these states.

Yes, left parties as usually are opposed to the creation of Telengana state. For last six decades they claimed to be the champion of Telenagana’s Dalits and Adivasis, informed us in their wonderful narratives, how they snatched land from the ‘powerful’ ‘ landlords’ and handed over to the poor Dalits which is rarely visible. The movement build up them remain no where. One does not know whether it is another educated conspiracy to keep the local populace subjugated under their ‘revolutionary’ leadership.

Telengana’s current upsurge reminds me of Uttarakhand’s mass protest against Uttar-Pradesh government

While, I am not fascinated personally by these arguments of small or big, as every argument has a counter argument. I was born in the hill state of Uttarakhand which was earlier part of Uttar-Pradesh and totally different from it in terms of culture, languages and geography. Irony was that top political leaders of Uttar-Pradesh came from Uttarakhand such Gobind Ballabh Pant, H.N.Bahuguna and N.D.Tiwari (interestingly all Brahmins and Congress party chief ministers). And any demand of Uttarakhand was looked down upon by this class for their own interest. No political party except for Uttarakhand Kranti Dal have been fighting for separate statehood. Whenever the Uttarakhand activists would go there, ND Tiwari would mention ‘ Uttarakhand state would come over my dead body’.

Tragically, the Hindutva’s forces were first to realize it. They jumped on anti Uttar-Pradesh sentiments of the people and came out openly in support of the state. It was 1993. The tumultuous years of Post Babari demolition. Uttar-Pradesh became new hot ground for Dalit Bahujan’s new access to power politics. India’s political map was changing and Uttar-Pradesh and Bihar went totally in control of these political forces, though not socially, economically and educationally, yet losing political control was painful.

The Uttar-Pradesh government was not keen on implementing Mandal commission recommendation in the state. After lot of pressures from different political forces, Mulayam Singh Yadav government actually accepted the report and notified under a separate government order ( GO). This single decision made Mulayam Singh Yadav and Maywati the biggest villain in Uttarakhand state. As a person deeply involved in the Ambedkarite movement, I came out against the mainstream political thought of Uttarakhand that no state could be build on the hate against one particular community. People like me felt that new Uttarakhand state was a desperate effort by these castes who were losing their importance elsewhere. Ofcourse, historical exploitation of Uttarakhand, its resources was definitely true and none can deny that 15 odd MLAs would make no difference in the Uttar-Pradesh’s gigantic Assembly of 400 odd people. So, demand for a separate state there was genuine.

The movement, however, was growing. People were sitting on Dharanas and two local news papers, Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagaran became household names, as each report would get published new day. So, most of the protest was symbolic yet it was there widespread. Their circulation jumped in millions. The students were sitting and the retired armed forces men who live in large number joined hand. The teachers decided to boycott classes. Almost all Uttarakhand was non-functional, yet political class in India was not ready to take the issue. Then came the announcement to organize a massive protest rally at the red fort in Delhi on October 2, 1994. All, this was happening at the non political platform. Political parties during the agitation period became defunct, in fact, they were not even allowed to venture in.

Thousands of people started coming in to Delhi from different parts of Uttarakhand. Unfortunately, our democratic leaders do not allow democratic protests. At Rampur ka Tiraha, a small village on the national high way, between Roorkee and Mujaffarnagar, the buses carrying activists was stopped by the Provincial Arms Constabulary ( PAC) of Uttar-Pradesh. In the dark night of October 1st-2, the PAC fired at the peaceful protesters, molested women and did not allow them to proceed. People ran to save their lives, in the sugar cane field. Many lost their ways. (One of my cousins remained untraced for many days and one friend died in police firing).

It was the biggest mishap in the history of Uttarakhand. Suddenly, the patience of the people burst and the entire peaceful state of Uttarakhand, which never ever saw any curfew, never even police check posts, came out in the street. The news of molestation of women had spread like wild fire. People came out in protest. Even those who were sitting on the margin joined the protest. Mulayam Singh Yadav became the most hated figure in the state. Policemen were targeted and life completely paralyzed. There was voluntary protest. Now, people were not just sitting in protest, they were out in streets. In the frenzy police had to open fire to save itself. Many young lives were lost in police firing.

This is a small state and we know each other mostly in our areas. Policing was never part of hills and for the first we saw policemen from the plains of Uttar-Pradesh, who had high disregard and contempt for hill people were brought to control the hill people. That is a irony of the ruling structure that it uses contradictions very well so to contain Telengana, it will bring police from Andhra, to control law and order in Nagaland, it will bring Assam Rifles. And that happened in Uttarakhand, giving wide disenchantment with Uttar-Pradesh administration.

While, the Uttarakhand movement was ignited on a wrong note of anti Mandal sentiments, as a human rights activist and also a native from that region, it pained me more, when I saw, people dying in police firing, women being molested by the policemen. It has been a peaceful region altogether where such cases were rare. The state did not celebrate any festival that year particularly when Dusshera and Diwali are celebrated with high zeal in Uttarakhand, that year, it was completely black out. The demand for Uttarakhand was from very beginning in 1950s. We have seen the utter contempt with which people would speak in Delhi. Like Bihar, Pahadi was a term often described for us. Most of the migrants were working in Dhabas in Delhi yet there was an elite class which always got better everywhere in the name of Uttarakhand.

The formation of Uttarakhand state was inevitable. Mulayam Singh Yadav created all kind of hurdles. Sikh peasantry from Punjab were asked to oppose the merger of Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar is this area has large illegal land holdings. Uttarakhand’s hills have small land holdings except for the Tarai and Babar regions.

While Mulayam Singh Yadav and other UP friends were ready to concede the demand of Uttarakhand, they wanted to control the state. So the boundary dispute was biggest. And the main disputed land were Hardwar and Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar. The Samajwadi party and BSP was adamant that Hardwar should not be part of it while Hardwar and SUN were traditionally a hill towns though because of procurement of land through manipulations, the non hill people had dominated the entire regions. The powerful Sikh leadership from Punjab came out against it as every one of them had their interests in big benami land holdings here. Actually, creation of Uttarakhand was a problem for big zamindars as they feared that the state would acquire their land. Compared to Uttar-Pradesh particularly western UP and Punjab the so-called farmers of Uttarakhand would be termed as landless, small and marginal.

After much difficulties the state came into being on November 7, 2000. One dream was filled but the tragedy remain that those parties who were at the margin during the protests became the main decision making parties of the state. N.D.Tiwari was imposed on the state by Congress party against the popular will and BJP now continue to rule the state.

Local movements which developed during creation of state have disappeared. The netas have their vehicles but those who lost their lives are forgotten and can be remembered only when there are some political manipulations.

The BJP made Nityanand Swamy, chief minister of Uttarakhand, who was actually not from the hills resulting in party’s dismal performance in assembly elections. Congress when came to power, made Narain Dutt Tiwari as chief minister, who played his best politics in the state by disturbing red beacon vehicles to his favorites.

Separation is better than suffocation

When you do not want to live with any one then what is the solution. It is like a joint family where the younger one want to live separately. Rather then living in suffocation, better to part peacefully. After that what ever are the concern, let the families face them separately. Of-course, I am not fanciful to the idea of which state is better or worst, as I remain border less. It is also a reality that those who talk of decentralization actually remain highly centralized when they get a chance. Every state has a contradiction. Many time, demand for decentralization comes from one the forces who want to maintain their own hegemony and this continues. So, one hegemony is broken and another is created and this continues for years as our political system is meant to create hegemony and messiahs. The sovereign public become helpless and expect miracles from their leaders who become ring leaders and betray the cause.

My concern in Uttarakhand were based on the conditions of Dalits and marginalized. I can not confirm whether their condition is better off but then definitely they might be as worst as in Uttar-Pradesh and Bihar. Ofcourse, in power structure, hills were always in the hands of upper castes because of their number strength. But that is the reality of democratic process and you can deny them this right to come to power. But protection of the minorities and Dalits is a constitutional obligation and political interest can not play their game with it. The state has really moved ahead in many thing and is really better than its former state. The electricity situation is much better than even Delhi, the schools, the road networks are growing. Ofcourse, the big companies are also there selling their big dreams, selling Ganga water and so on.

Every Life is Precious

The good thing is that at the moment Telengana’s protests are spontaneous mass struggle. Though parties like TRS which often changes track are leading lights of the day, claim to have ignited this yet it is surely going out of their control. Now, the BJP, as usual, has also lent its support. I am witnessing the very same events what happened in Uttarakhand during 1994’s massive protests. It is tragedy that the spontaneous movement builds by people goes in the hands of the desperate politicians and result in nothing but their own power. Except for Assam where the All Assam Student Union and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad had launched a movement and became the first political movement that came to power yet in the absence of unity and understanding it fell through and virtually disappeared.

It is always painful when young lives are lost. The young must fight their battles. It is the duty of movement leaders in general and student leaders in particular to appeal to youngsters to join the movement, change the politics by joining it and not by ending their lives by committing suicide. It is the tragedy of the mass upsurge when hysteria is created through screaming TV channels, movement leaders that they forget that it is lethal for more sensitive people when they watch and hear these stories resulting in committing suicide. That is the pain of hysteria created by such jingoism. It happened on many occasions. We have seen how the stories of Ayodhya demolition were projected by the Hindutva outfits, how media plays. Now with live TV channels in each city and kasbas, we have the anchors becoming new messiahs of the people and every body happy with their names in the media and channels, hysteria is created and continued to played for their TRPs. Every tragedy is an opportunity of business for them. Living in Delhi during the tumultuous period of anti Mandal agitation in the 1990s and later on whole Ayodhya’s frenzy in UP, Bihar, Maharastra, Gujarat and Rajasthan, we have seen how the newly mushrooming channels hyped the deaths and created frenzy. Andhra itself had seen how media hyped the death of Y.S.Rajshekar Reddy, virtually making him the tallest leaders, ignoring his big faults and his attitude toward Telengana, his anti Telengana statement during Assembly polls.

One thing is clear that Telengana could never really merge with greater Andhra. The government should realize it and act on it. Secondly, the local people will always resent, if the powerful castes and communities from other regions use it their colony. We have seen it in Uttarakhand and others also saw it. It is always better to part ways peacefully and then become friends on equality. The possessiveness of Andhra’s powerful communities over Telengana is uncalled for and similar to what the powerful Sikhs from Punjab had over division of district of Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand. Actually, powerful lobbies, political interests all merge together to foil the dreams. Political class is out to create these differences with people so that they can reap rich harvest on hatred. At the end of the day, you have to work together. We all remain interdependent on each other and hatred, jingoism and ultra nationalism leaves us nowhere. It is time that Congress party at the center think of creating a separate Telangana state so that this hysteria is curtailed and people are back to work and innocent lives are not lost in the politics of rhetoric making political space for redundant political leaders and aspiring power brokers.

Courtesy: CounterCurrents

Telangana Backward Districts

Links:

1) BRGF District Charts

2) BRGF Districts Map

3) PDF Document