Please treat this post as an interlude to the series that I will be posting on deliberative democracy and the true empowerment of people. In a way, even this post can be considered as linked to the question, though a little remotely. I have been meeting a lot of youngsters and all of them see a separate Telangana only as a new horizon which will ensure that all the jobless will get jobs and those who have paltry salaries will get a ten fold (this is no exaggeration, since a person who now gets four thousand rupees per month says that in the new State he will get Rs. 40,000/- and this chap is not even tenth class pass) and everyone will live happily ever after. This is a fairy tale, I would like to draw everyone's attention to George Orwell's Animal Farm again, a fairy tale that tells people how things will go wrong and how promises will be broken.
Apart from this unfortunate bit of information that I have passed on to you, I would also like to bring to light the question of what will happen if a separate Telangana does come into existence. Though the Sri Krishna Committe report is being denounced unequivocally by the protagonists of separate Telangana, I am sure that they will happily invoke it if the decision to divide the State of Andhra Pradesh is taken. Everybody while rejecting the basis of the report is already happy to choose the "fifth option" cited in the report. I am a little stumped by the reasons cited for the division by the protagonists. "We want to rule ourselves" is not an option because right now people of Telangana are not being ruled by foreigners. Any Indian can contest an election from any part of the country, and this has been demonstrated by former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's election from Ramtek in Maharashtra, the present Prime Minister's election from Assam and Jayaprada's election from Uttar Pradesh. And the ourselves bit implies sons of the soil which is most difficult to establish in a country as old as India where people have always had the liberty of living in a place that was liked by them. Hyderabad is a prime example with former Election Commissioner of India, Lyngdoh choosing to live here. But more than this what worries me is the financial spend that will come into being when two states are made and one will have to develop a new capital.
The development of a new capital is an exercise fraught with all kinds of problems. First, the drain on the country's, and I stress country's exchequer will be massive with lakhs of crores of rupees required to set up the new capital. When such large amounts of money are being spent needless to say, corruption will reign supreme. With proper audits being implausible a lot of private purses will swell while the government and the people will get further impoverished. This is not an issue that is pertinent only to Andhra-Telangana region. Since the money will have to come from the Union Government it means that it is a drain of the tax payers money as well as an additional burden on the tax payers. Given the history of who pays taxes in this country, the burden will fall upon middle class and upper middle class employees whose earnings can be seen in black and white. Film stars, big businessmen, corporates et al will find means of evading at least a part of the taxes. I think therefore the nation will have to consulted when it comes to the undertaking of such an issue. However, given the nature of politics of this country, any consultation at the national level will produce results that will become problems in themselves. Involvement of the nation in such an exercise would mean that instead of looking at the economic viability of this proposal, new proposals for Poorvanchal, Harit Pradesh, Vidarbha and Gorkhaland will gain greater strength and proposals for further divisions will come into being.
As I have consistently argued in this blog for over a year now, these are all designs of uneducated politicians trying to create spaces for themselves and their progeny. And that is in principle a violation of the spirit of democracy. I fear that after the great divide the people and the country will be set back a little more in developmental terms. And that would be a pity, given the fact that our neighbour China is already more advanced than India in most fields except in those that demand a knowledge of English. While we are caught in various jingoisms of our own and fighting to move backwards, the Chinese have already initiated English language learning among their students. If that programme is successful, the Chinese will even take away the advantage that India has in the service industry. But people of no consequence in these matters such as me, can only watch the situation unfold and do nothing about it. This is now an issue in the hands of the politicians and not so much common people. I am worried about that, I admit.
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