My take on agitations - 2

I had promised that I shall be back to talk more about what I was already talking about in my blog yesterday. I had stopped at a point where I was talking about the agitation in question being now governed by laws of physics than by a direction given by any ideology. That brings me to the point where it becomes not just pertinent but necessary to understand the rationale behind the desire for a Separate Telangana. I am aware that there is a big and clever history behind the seemingly easy to understand agitation. It would be a little boring to go into the exact details of that history but I shall most certainly not avoid any of the details that are of significance to understanding this situation today.

I am quite convinced that the origins of this movement or agitation for a Separate Telangana have their roots in the carving out of the Andhra State from the erstwhile Madras Presidency that existed during the British Rule. Here, at this point it may be of significance to make a certain point about one social variable that has been the scourge of this country. I am talking about the caste system. The caste system has had and still does have the ability of what Hegel called "aufheben" or "aufgehoben" which gets translated into English rather poorly as sublation. What I want to say here is that caste started of to serve a particular reason which was cosmological in its beginning but went on to become a social category and now it is firmly a political variable. The point that is to be noted here is that while the content of caste was cosmological it was more likely devoid of a notion of power, but when it metamorphosed into the social and the political it certainly became a variable that was used to exercise power. Here comes the sublation bit. Let us simply say that sublation or "aufgehoben" is a situation where the form of something while seemingly constant has a content that is evolving as per times. That in my opinion has definitely happened with caste. If we were to look at the scholarship that is available to us on caste, most do not even seem to understand its cosmological beginnings and simply think of its existence as always being social. The slightly more perceptive among the community can see its transformation into a political entity but do not make the necessary linkages that are necessary to understand the causes behind the transformation. I am sure, I can be asked as to what this exposition on caste has to do with the larger purpose that I have set out with. The answer is straight forward. If one has to understand the question of separation then one has to understand the politics that go behind the desire.

So to come back to the point that I was making, understanding the reason for the carving out of a Separate Andhra State from the Madras Presidency holds the clue for understanding the separate Telangana agitation. In the early decades of the twentieth century one saw in the Madras Presidency region a rise in politics that was apparently based in the Dravidian vs Aryan politics but in reality was based in a caste rivalry. Most of the jobs in the Indian Civil Service of that time were occupied by Brahmins who constituted about 2% of the population. The Dravida Kazhagam and the Justice Party started movements demanding a caste census and providing jobs on the basis of the percentage of population in one caste. This meant if there n% of people in one caste then n% of the jobs available were to be given to members of that caste. One can see the origins of the quota system here. This too is of enormous significance for us in understanding the logic behind the Separate Telangana movement. The Brahmins (most of whom were Telugu speaking people) did not like this proposal and what started of as a Dravidian Vs Aryan thing was given the shape of Tamilian vs Telugu dimension and to cut a long story short this led to the carving out of a Separate Andhra State years later. The point of significance here is that what all I have described here are developments that took place in the Madras Presidency region which because of being under British rule saw a fair amount of capitalistic development and progress. What aided that process was the fact that the Andhra of then which is the Coastal Andhra of today is rich in resources starting from water, to soil and all other things that contribute to prosperity and development. This Coastal Andhra region was merged with the Telangana and the Rayalaseema region to form Andhra Pradesh when states were created on linguistic basis.

The time is now appropriate for the insertion of a paranthesis. When people in general talk about India as being Federal or Quasi- federal (the latter a most inappropriate description of the Indian system of governance) system of government the temptation is to compare it with the United States of America. All comparisons are legitimate as long as they serve the purpose of enlightenment but not if they serve the purpose of confusion. In India that is what has happened, confusion. Mr. K.T. Rama Rao a leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi said why should India be contented with 25 states when the USA has 50. The ridiculousness of this will become obvious when one sees the huge difference in the way in which the USA and India have come into being. To put it very briefly the federalism of the USA was a coming together of a pre-existing States to form a union of sorts. In India it has been the other way round. First it was the creation of an India and then the effort to see how it could be divided into constituent states to facilitate better governance. The variable chosen was language and thus states were born. India first and constituent states later. Now we can close the paranthesis. The necessity of this paranthesis will become obvious at latter stages of this piece.

And so Andhra Pradesh was born out of clubbing the Coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana regions. What is important for us to recognise is that while Coastal Andhra saw development of the capitalist variety thanks to its being administered by the British, the Telangana region saw little or no development at all. The reason being that it was a part of the Hyderabad State which was administered by the Nizam and the society here was feudal and more agrarian. The difficult bit for Telangana was that it was deprived relatively of resources such as water and many areas of it fell in the rain shadow region. Though the people of Coastal Andhra and Telangana were Telugu speaking the cultures from which they came were different. You could say Capitalism vs Feudalism. I have not spoken of Rayalaseema and will not either since till most recently it was not a part of this process at all. I will therefore concentrate upon the Coastal Andhra vs Telangana aspect alone.

This part two too is long enough to merit a break. I will continue the discussion and for that I will be back with more very soon.

My take on agitations.

Let me start off by being honest. I have always been one of those skeptics who could not determine if writing was a good idea. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was this thought while writing is most certainly a transmission of ideas, it probably is also a certain form of self perpetuation. This lingering doubt along with an all encompassing laziness kept me from being a writer. I have written those articles and theses that are necessary for the obtaining of promotions in my profession, which incidentally is teaching, but I have always been of the opinion that writing anything more was quite unnecessary. Now I am veering round to the view the writing a blog or a book may not be such a bad idea. A question can therefore be asked as to why the change?

The answer will have everything to do with the afore mentioned idea of self-perpetuation. While at one time it seemed that self-perpetuation was a regrettable exercise, my recently confronting a situation in which self-perpetuation is the norm has decided for me that in the context of many perpetuating selfs, mine too can be one. I therefore write my first piece in my blog.

The context of this is the agitation that is taking place in the University where I work, the Osmania University at Hyderabad in India. The Osmania University was set up the Nizam of Hyderabad with a noble intent; of educating the people in his State. Unfortunately however the University has now slipped slowly into a situation that is ignoble. Till about twenty years ago, many places in the world, especially universities in the United Kingdom, including Oxford, had recognised Osmania University as a good and well-known university in India. Sadly today that is not the case. Everywhere I go I am asked about why the standards have plummeted so much in my university. My answer often is just a wry smile or a shrug of my shoulders. Today however, those gestures do not suffice as adequate answers when the university has become the focal point of attention. What has made it that is the fact that the Separate Telangana Agitation seems to have its epicentre here. In fact, it is not an epicentre at all. It seems to be the only point from where the agitation is happening. This is borne out by the fact that the rest of the city of Hyderabad and areas in the Telangana region are going about their lives as they would in regular circumstances.

It is not my interest here to discuss the merits or the demerits of this agitation, though I can see the demerits in huge, magnified letters. For one, I can see that no foreign students will be coming to the university if things proceed on these lines. But the protagonists of the agitation will say to hell with the foreign students. This is a point of distress to me. The student composition of the university today is such that a great majority of students come from a rural background with very little exposure to the ways of the present day world. In such a situation, having foreign students on the campus is one compensatory measure of providing a little more exposure than one would otherwise have. My anxiety is that if the foreign students stay away from my university then it would negatively impact on the culture and possibilities of exposure available to local students. In my mind this is all important because it hurts me to see that my students are already disadvantaged in more ways than one. So am I against the agitation?

I am against the agitation in its present form. My understanding of the issue of division of the State of Andhra Pradesh is that its motivations are very political and embroiled in a power struggle that has not much to do with the aspirations of the common man. The common man that I am talking about is not one who belongs to any particular section, stratum or denomination of society. The common man is the one who is truly common in its most literal sense. It is not really my intention here to go into the historical factors and facts that have contributed to the present imbroglio, though I believe that I am very much in possession of all those murky details. My present concern is the articulation of the problem. Recent history has documented very clearly that a rift of sorts between a couple of politicians in one political party led to the creation of a political party based in the principle of separation. Though this party has been in existence for a period that is long enough for it to take part in two general elections. Its performance in the first general elections that it faced in 2004 was nothing to write home about, but the second time out in 2009, it was something to write about. It was all but decimated. Yet a few months after the poll results are out and after the party in question lost the confidence to take part in the elections for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Hyderabad and rather coincidentally with the elections an agitation has been launched. The party under discussion does not have a cadre and it has not been in a position to show a mass base either. So it seems it deemed it fit to convert the student base of the region into its de facto cadre and has launched the agitation for a separate state. What is now obvious is that the students themselves have many different benefactors coming from different political and ideological backgrounds and the consequence is that while the students are together in their agitation there is no clear or apparent leadership. It is now therefore an agitation that is running as per the laws of physics rather than on the basis of any enlightened leadership. Meanwhile there is no resolution in sight.

I shall end this post here. Treat this as part one of what could be a very long post. I will be back with part two sooner than you think.