My take on agitations - conclusion

The last bit of my story on the Telangana agitation mentioned the previous separatist agitation. Since then a lot of things have happened which culminated in the second iteration of the same. Here is the time when one has to understand the role of the dominant upper castes in the Telangana region. The sons of the soil argument has been forwarded first by the Telangana Reddys and the Velamas. These two castes are firmly rooted in Telangana feudalism and have not kept up with the pace of entrepreneurial capitalist progress that the Kamma community from coastal Andhra had shown. The Kamma entrepreneur grew in stature and in size during the rule of the TDP with NT Rama Rao as Chief Minister. In fact, the Telugu Desam party represented the Kamma business interest and was patronized by the Kammas from Coastal Andhra. Media Baron Ramoji Rao threw his weight behind NTR and the TDP and functioned almost as a mouth piece for the party. The shrewd entrepreneurial spirit of Ramoji Rao saw him taking his Eenadu daily newspaper in Telugu to every nook and cranny of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Over a period of time highly localised editions of the newspaper became available. What became a formidable combination was NTR's populist policies as Chief Minister and the carrying of the news of the same to all people by the Eenadu news paper. This did lead to an increase in the popularity of NTR and the TDP especially in the Telangana region where populism worked due to the relatively higher levels of poverty and lack of development. This also presented an opportunity for the Kamma capitalist from Coastal Andhra to expand into the Telangana region. The logical destination for this was Hyderabad which is the State Capital and the biggest market. It all started off as hotel industry and the cinema industry. Later on it went on to retail market capturing and finally onto the Information Technology industry which came alive with the dot com boom (which later went bust) and the opportunities provided through the Y2K problem. Mainly the Kamma caste and some others like the Rajus and Brahmins from the Coastal Andhra region basically took advantage of the IT boom. During this time another development happened. Hyderabad saw the drain of the original dwellers to the USA over a period of time. These Hyderabadis went to the States with the intention of never returning and the space left by them in Hyderabad was occupied by a wave of migration from the coastal districts. This is the time that also saw the burgeoning of engineering colleges and the sheer number of them actually made local reservations almost redundant. The students from Coastal Andhra were in a better position to compete and therefore amassed the benefits. When the second IT wave came, it brought the out sourcing boom with it. Now was the opportunity not only to go abroad but also make use of jobs in Hyderabad itself with Chief Ministers like Chandrababu Naidu and Rajshekhar Reddy encouraging the trend. The business opportunity was once again taken up by the Coastal Andhra entrepreneurs, and the jobs by the educated sections from there. The mainly feudal Reddys and Velamas missed out on these opportunities and have since been relegated into the background. For caste groups that had dominated the region for aeons this situation was most unpalatable. The other losers were people from the BC and SC communities since they were never provided decent education ever. NTR's and TDP's support of local capitalism translated into a divide between the feudal Reddy and Velama communities on the one side and the capitalist Kamma and Raju communities on the other. On both sides are the Brahmins playing relatively insignificant and consequently peripheral role in the development of antagonisms freshly.

The feudal culture of Telangana also meant that jobs were given to those who curried favour with the entrenched power groups represented by the Reddys and the Velamas. This unfortunate tendency was extended even into government employment and educational institutions including universities. The bit about the universities is extremely important because in the last three decades a good university like Osmania University has seen its reputation go down drastically in social sciences due to lack of quality teachers and researchers. The same maybe true of other faculties as well. This tendency has almost killed education in the districts of Telangana and education has been reduced to the provision of degrees to students who have no knowledge of the subjects that they are supposed to have studied. Here is a crisis. There are plenty of jobs available in Hyderabad but nobody from Telangana has the skill or the capability to claim them. These jobs have gone to Andhra people wherever there are hard core skills requirements and to people from other parts of the country wherever there are jobs that need soft skills.

The Reddys and the Velamas have also slowly lost their lands and the power that comes along with it. For communities used to the exercise of social power this is an unfamiliar situation and the step that they have taken is the kindling of the separate Telangana State spirit in order to drive back the Coastal Andhra Kammas and any one else who is a threat to them. When they were in power they had followed the David Eastonian principle of authoritative allocation of resources and values but with the growth of power of the Kammas the same principle was used by the other side to dispossess the Reddys and the Velamas in the technocracy that was created in the State especially during the reign of Chandrababu Naidu. This coincided with the time when the Indian State and the State of Andhra Pradesh had embarked upon a programme of structural reform as advised by the World Bank and that saw a drastic pull back from the employment sector by the Government of Andhra Pradesh. With the withdrawal of the State and a majority of jobs going into the private sector a meritocracy of sorts came into being and employment depended on certain skills which people from Telangana were not in possession of thanks to an almost useless and archaic system of education. This has led to lack of employment among the rural students of Telangana. The Separate Telangana agitation has two dimensions. The call for a Separate Telangana by the Reddys and Velamas now, is basically an attempt to snatch back the power that they are used to. Their belief is that if the State becomes accessible to them again they would be in a position to exercise social power. The other side is represented by the students who mainly belong to BC, SC and to an extent ST communities. Politicians, especially the Maoists are interested in exploiting this opportunity so that they can seize control of a new State. The belief of the students is that the creation of the new State would help them to get employment while the Maoists who have lost a lot of ground in their traditional stronghold want that back. The Telangana issue is therefore more complex than it seems and has within itself tangles that will prove to be a problem now and in the future. The agitation is now headless in the sense that it is now in no one's hand. There are various groups and all believe that they can gain control of the movement and corner the benefits that come with the success of the movement. What all this will lead do is anybody's guess. There is no crystal ball that one can gaze into and predict the future. I am just being social science student doing a post facto analysis of things. Whatever may happen with the movement it seems that it is unlikely to make everyone happy because within the movement there are tensions which will surface when the question of who controls Telangana pops up. That then is the conclusion to my story. In all this I have seen that there is a huge failure at all levels in terms of leadership and that for us should be a matter of concern. A failed leadership is a failed country and that should be unacceptable to anyone. This is a subject that needs further exploration and that is what I hope and intend to do next.