In a casual conversation with some old friends a few days ago, I found myself being asked this question as to why Telugus cannot be one state while every other linguistic state seemed to be doing so just fine. Its not a question that ever came to my mind I must admit, and while in the group I dismissed the question as not significant. I also felt that there wasn't any summary proof of other linguistic states doing just fine and I left it at that. But in the last couple of days that question has comeback to me again and again. Not only that, I myself had written in one of the posts that we Indians have tendency to divide ourselves without any outside help. Einstein called India the cradle of mathematics once. In the cradle we seem to have perfected two things - multiplication and division. We are obviously very fecund so while anything else maybe multiplying or not, our population certainly is and has been for a very long time now. The more the population the greater the possibilities of division since we have one of the highest densities of population in the world (excluding Monaco and the Vatican City) that is consuming resources faster than it is generating them. This isn't just a wise-crack because our natural resources are under great pressure due to the ever burgeoning population requiring more and more land. Marxian economics may talk about the extraction of surplus value from labour - the variable capital - in a capitalist society and not so much from land, but in India it does seem as if land is still an important variable even in the age of capital (and I do think that now is the time when we are definitely in the capitalist era). I will not speak too much about this in the context of the whole of India but only about Andhra Pradesh since my investigation here is about why Telugus are unable to live together.
The hotly disputed statistics put out by the Sri Krishna Committee claim that the lion's share of economic productivity and development is centred on Hyderabad and that the city is now more connected to the national and international economy more than to the local economy. The report also says that most of Hyderabad's workforce is in the service related IT and ITeS sectors. It also cautions that Hyderabad itself will have to be careful because it faces the danger of becoming the worlds service house rather an industrially developed city. But for the moment that is an area that I will not visit. Most of the development figures that have been taken into consideration by the Sri Krishna Committee seem to be from the agriculture sector and that too in the last few years when the state has had bountiful rainfall. It is therefore no surprise that the figures without involving Hyderabad in the developmental process of Telangana, are still comparable with those of the ones from coastal Andhra. But we do know of the saying 'lies, white lies and statistics' and therefore we shall proceed with caution while looking at those figures (here I would like to say that I am not questioning the integrity and honesty with which the Sri Krishna Committee did its work. I am and will always be suspicious of statistics and statistical methods since statistics can be used to speak any language).
Hyderabad which is not so dependent on agriculture is therefore sought after by people on both sides of the divide. The coastal Andhra folks will and have been claiming that they developed Hyderabad with the Telangana people rightly disputing those claims. I apologize for again bringing my father into this but he also gave me an insight when he said that the onus of developing Hyderabad was on the Nizam and that he. the Nizam, was mainly responsible for developing the city and what happened after was only building on that firm base that had already been built. He also claims that the real coastal Andhra presence in Hyderabad increased only during the time that NTR and the Telugu Desam came into power and they only invested in a city that had already been developed. Film industry and much later the IT industry seemed to have been their real initiatives. Before anyone hurriedly celebrates let me point out here that Chandra Babu Naidu only' initiated' the development of the Hitech City which grew from investments from abroad and all parts of India and not just from coastal Andhra. What is more important here is the fact that his administration introduced a new model of corruption based in acquiring lands through benami transactions or through private individuals and then putting projects around those lands and selling them at exorbitant prices. The coastal Andhra people benefited from these transactions. That is one of the problems. In this process the traditional land holding of the Reddy's came down significantly and they realized that they were also losing their traditional power which came from holding of the lands (I confess that the story here is a little over simplified but I assure one and all that this simplification does not alter the true nature of the story). KCR as the insider of the Telugu Desam knew this plot quite well and when he split with the party, he came out with all guns blazing against the coastal Andhra people. In my post yesterday I had said that people had been 'unhappy' in Telangana and that there was a dormant Telangana sentiment. Chandrashekar Rao exploited that sentiment and the rest of the story is there in my post of yesterday. I shall therefore spare you the agony of rereading the same again. However, the intent of todays post is that despite claims (by statistics) to the contrary, doubtlessly, Andhra Pradesh is one of the backward states of India. It is as such not as progressive as Punjab or Maharashtra and therefore in spite of capitalism coming in, the people of the state did not completely lose interest in land. Therefore the Telangana-Andhra divide still has a very strong land component to it. Political leaders will and have made careers out of opportunism in the absence of any ideology and therefore the issue has reached where it has. In my next post I shall talk about another dimension that has been politically exploited for nefarious purposes and that is caste.
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