Reading the newspaper this morning gave me a huge shock. There are two things about our country that continue to astound me. One is the education system and the other is politics. Just when I think that things cannot get any worse, things go down a few more notches. These are two areas which are bottomless pits or perhaps in cosmic terms black holes. Let me come back to the point of the shock that the Hindu of today gave me. The front page carries an article about our Home Minister and his take on the Telangana problem. Mr. Chidambaram, whose admirer I once was, has started falling to newer and newer depths from the fateful date of 9th December, 2009 when at almost midnight he made this strange announcement regarding Telangana and promptly went back on it in just a few days when there was hue and cry from the other side. Then the Sri Krishna Committee was constituted and it even submitted its report. The chapter 8 around which there was a lot of controversy was supposed to be "secret". Judicial courts were brought into the picture by a petitioner who wanted to know why the contents were not being made public. Even while the courts were trying to decide whether or not there was merit in the Central Government's stand that the contents of the said chapter should be kept confidential, in Osmania University a seminar was held on the "Chapter 8 of the Sri Krishna Committee". To my utter surprise I saw not one but several copies of the chapter doing the rounds. Everybody claimed that they knew the contents and the draconian aspects of the chapter were discussed and condemned. So what was the secrecy all about? Why was the time of the honourable courts being wasted by the government?
The Telangana issue has been through many dimensions and the latest utterances of the Home Minister of India, Mr. Chidambaram along with what I just stated in the paragraph above show that this issue is now one that is also exposing the nature of governance in India. Perhaps a little bit of explanation is necessary here. The Home Minister has apparently said that the political parties of Andhra Pradesh should come to some kind of an agreement on what they want and then in consultation with them the Centre will decide upon what to do with the demand for a separate Telangana. The Hindu quotes the Home Minister as having said that this is an issue concerning Telugu speaking people (what about the Urdu speaking people, the Gujaratis, the Marwaris, the Marathi speaking people who have made Hyderabad and various other parts of the state their home) and that it is for them to arrive at some understanding and the Centre is only a "facilitator". That is the word that shocked me. The government now is a "facilitator"? This then brings many questions to my mind, but I am not going to unload all of them on to you, dear reader. I will only put out the ones that concern us all.
I want to know if this facilitator called the Central Government will facilitate secession by some states in the North Eastern part of the country such as Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram just to name a few, if a few political parties or groups demand secession? Will it also facilitate the independence of or accession to Pakistan of Kashmir if the Hurriyat and other militant groups exert enough pressure on it (the Centre that is)?That is the first concern and my first question is about these concerns. The second question I want to ask pertains to the idea of democracy itself. Is democracy nothing but the operation of pressure politics? If the Telugu people reach a consensus that they want to stand divided and the Centre is fine with that, then what about the demand of the Gujjars that they be classified as Scheduled Tribes? That is a unanimous demand from the Gujjars, so why does the government not give them what they want? What is governance then? Giving what politicians want?
The Home Minister has said definitively that there are eight political parties in Andhra Pradesh and some of them have made up their minds while others have not. As per the Hindu of today, the TRS, the BJP and the CPI want a separate Telangana. The CPI(M) wants Andhra Pradesh to stay as it is. The Congress, the YSR Congress and the TDP are undecided, while the MIM will wait for the Congress' and TDP's stand before it makes its own stand public. This is part of the report in the Hindu gave me a second shock. Let me explain. I will start with the MIM. Asaduddin Owaisi in the past definitely said that he believed that it is in the interests of the Muslims for Andhra Pradesh to be as it is. His brother Akbaruddin Owaisi once said that if people from Hyderabad can go and work in other countries such as Dubai, how can you stop anyone coming to Hyderabad in search of employment or business? Now why is the MIM saying that they will wait for the Congress and the TDP to come out with their stand before they speak their mind? Next let us consider the BJP. When Chandrababu Naidu was Chief Minister and when at that time Lal Krishna Advani had visited Hyderabad and was boarding a plane at Begumpet Airport to go back to Delhi, a TV reporter had asked if the BJP was for giving a separate Telangana to which he emphatically said no. When asked for reasons, he said that Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh because these regions were far flung from the capitals of the states that they were in and that this was hampering administration while in the case of Telangana, the Capital was right int he middle of Telangana and therefore this issue was different from the other three. When the BJP and the NDA were voted out of power in 2004, the tune changed completely and the BJP said that it stood for a separate Telangana. It even made that promise in 2009, but no one believed them and so they won just two seats.
The YSR Congress now. After the first phase of polling was done and dusted in the 2009 elections and when the Telangana region had finished voting, the then Chief Minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy, went to campaign in the Rayalseema region where elections were scheduled for the second phase and said that if people did not vote for the Congress (not the YSR Congress), then people of Rayalseema would have to have a passport to go to Hyderabad because the design of the TRS and the idea of separate Telangana was to deprive people of Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra the right to send their children to good schools in Hyderabad and also to work and set up businesses there. The poor man died and his son YS Jaganmohan Reddy as Member of the Parliament went into the well of the Lok Sabha along with members of the Telugu Desam Party to say that he stood for an undivided Andhra Pradesh. The man now steers this party called the YSR Congress and says that he is the true inheritor of his father's legacy. His father's and his utterances in the past are clear, so where is the necessity for new thinking?
The Telugu Desam Party really confounds me. Its supremo, Chandra Babu Naidu says Coastal Andhra and Telangana are like his two eyes. In 2004 when he went for elections and was sure that he would comeback to power he said that the TDP stood for "Samaikhya Andhra Pradesh" or "United Andhra Pradesh". The TDP along with the NDA received a drubbing and since then Naidu has stopped talking of United Andhra Pradesh, concentrating on his two eye theory. What does that two eye theory mean anyway? Does it mean that they are two distinct entities or does it mean that they have to remain in the same face? Classic case of sitting on the fence. I will quote Mark Knopfler's lyric from his song "Once Upon A Time In The West" where he says "sitting on the fence is a dangerous course, you might even catch a bullet from a peace keeping force".
In 2004 YS Rajashekhar Reddy just about stopped short of saying that he and his party were open to creating a separate Telangana and therefore had a truck with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi. In 2009 he did a complete volte face and I have already mentioned what he said. The TDP had a truck with the TRS in 2009. The TDP and the Congress have two lobbies. Nagam Janardhan Reddy and Revanth Reddy have promised the people of Telangana that they will make sure a Telangana is created. Yerran Naidu of the same party has assured people in Coastal Andhra that his party will not let Andhra Pradesh be bifurcated. Both belong to the same party. The Congress under leaders such as Sukhender Reddy and Madhu Yashki are striving for a separate Telangana while JC Diwaker Reddy and Kavuri Sambasiva Rao are striving to keep Andhra Pradesh as it is. The Praja Rajyam Party which is shortly merging with the Congress started by supporting a "Social Justice Telangana" and ended up supporting "United Andhra Pradesh". Now after the merger is completed we will never know what Chiranjeevi who started the party stands for.
Now to comeback to what the Home Minister said, "arrive at a consensus" and then approach the Centre. Are politicians allowed to do what they please without taking the aspirations of the people into consideration? How can one political party be home to two warring groups? What kind of democracy is this? I have written about Team Anna Hazare and said that they do not constitute Civil Society in any sense of the term and that the tactics that they were using were tantamount to blackmail. How different are our politicians from that? Politicians functioning for individual gain rather than working in the interests of their constituents. The sad thing is that everybody knows the truth behind "United Andhra Pradesh" and "Separate Telangana". The politicians are only interested in Hyderabad. The Rayalseema politicians control land mafias in Hyderabad and surrounding areas (Greater Hyderabad). The Coastal Andhra politicians control land, educational institutions and various businesses. They have been making hay for sometime. The Telangana politicians after they have left the TDP or the Congress now want to create an atmosphere conducive for their taking over Hyderabad and all the goodies that come with it. Nobody cares two hoots for the rest of the state. What is sadder is that people despite knowing all this are not willing to teach these politicians a lesson. The people spectate while the politicians play their game of one up man ship over each other. The bad thing is that this spectating will prove costly since the politicians are playing with our lives. If we do not act and let our views be known, we will deserve whatever we get.
No comments:
Post a Comment