Sri Krishna Committee report is out

All TV news channels have started telecasting the five directives or five possibilities that have been identified by the Sri Krishna Committee which has submitted its report. The five possibilities apparently as per news channels are

1. United Andhra Pradesh (Status Quo)

2. United Andhra Pradesh with three separate development boards exclusively for Telangana

3. Creation of a Union Territory that will encompass Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Nalgonda and Mahbub Nagar Districts

4. Creation of a new State which will have Rayalseema and Telangana as one state and Andhra as the other with Hyderabad as the Capital for both.

5. Division of the Andhra Pradesh State into Telangana and Andhra (presumably with Hyderabad as Joint Capital, but this thing is not very clear yet).

Though this post is based on media bedlam and lot of other noise, it is possibly too early to get critical of the Sri Krishna Committee report. On the face of it, this is nothing new. Post the 1969 separate Telangana agitation there was a creation of a board for specific development in Telangana. Nobody knows where that is now. Union Territory is old hat and lot of people have been asking for that. Rayalseema and Telangana as one was proposed by J C Diwakar Reddy (Congress Party) and endorsed by Asaduddin Owaisi (MIM). They both said they prefer status quo or a United Andhra Pradesh but if a split had to happen they wanted it this way. Separate Andhra with Rayalseema on one side and Telangana on the other is the demand of the TRS.

So on the face of things it appears that the committee has only reiterated what has come through in the form of various demands. As I have said this is probably to early to comment since the report is claimed to be an 800 page one and some of the leaks in the papers have said that the committee believed that there was no angle to believe that backwardness was the exclusive feature of Telangana alone. What is obvious is that the setting up of the committee was to buy time and prepare to take a decision and also prepare a strategy to deal with the fall out of the decision. It is obvious that a full circle has been drawn and the ball is back in the Central Government's court. The decision will therefore be political without anyone knowing what the people of the state really want. A few people have remarked that this imbroglio is a result of the hasty announcement made by Home Minister P C Chidambaram that fateful December night in 2009. In which all we can say is oh politicians what have you done? And maybe we should also ask what more will you do?

P.S. Not proof read. Errors maybe excused.

P.P.S: Parts of this post are inaccurate. There are six options and not five.