I have not been posting on this blog for a long time now. That is mainly due to the fact that my job at another place, where I had gone on lien from Osmania University had given me so much grief that I lost all motivation for anything in life. Even though I started this blog to give my take on the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, I had long ago said, that I had nothing more to say and therefore, there will be no more posts about that subject. I have been commenting on the wayward ways of politicians, though. But that to came to a stage where there was not much new happening there and so except for the occasional post jesting about them and their ways, I have not said much. All through I have maintained that I am from Telangana and that I will have no problems living in a Telangana State if and when it has become a reality. Well, it has now become a reality, and I have no problems with that or with living here; after all this is my home. But there are a few things that I have seen and experienced which do not portend well for the future of the people of what will now become two states.
I know that politicians have been saying that there will be peace and amity and KCR has even said that people from "Seemandhra" (I personally do not like this expression coined by the media, which most people have taken to as fish do to water) can live in peace without any fear of persecution. So many other politicians have said the same and I think it is a very good thing. Asaduddin Owaisi has even said that the word settler should not be used (this he did a few months ago, when it was clear that there was no stopping the division of the state). The Convener of the T-JAC has even said that the quarrel is not with the people of the other region but with the leadership of the Coastal region who had hijacked all the benefits including those which should have actually come to Telangana. He is probably right, and I do appreciate what he said to assuage the feelings of others who had come to Hyderabad from the other side.
Let me now come to the point I made about my experiences. I quote these experiences to demonstrate that the politicians' utterances about how there is no divide among the people and that all is well in both regions. Perhaps that is true with a great percentage of people who live on both sides, but there are enough people today who are so aggressive that they do not mind hurling abuse. First let me quote the latest event. I was invited by a TV channel to discuss upon Federalism and its emergence in India. My two co-panelists were advocates one each from the Telangana and the Coastal Andhra regions. The topic was federalism but it took exactly 10 seconds for it to become all about Telangana and the two gentlemen wasted no time in making a slanging match and started shouted at each other calling each other names. I sat through the whole thing silently and came back after having spoken for about 40 seconds overall. I was very perturbed by how the two gentlemen had resorted to name calling. Cheats, land grabbers, unethical fellows, brutes, barbarians etc. Now one of the two gentlemen was from the Telugu Desam Party and the other apparently was leading the Telangana Lawyers JAC. So a party functionary from TDP who is also from Andhra kept talking about how the Telangana movement was rubbish and there were no truth to its claims while the other retorted in a similar vein. My question was what was Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu implying when he agreed to the bifurcation. It is a different matter that he has without withdrawing from the earlier position shifted to the Andhra side, probably for consolidation of his position in that region which was otherwise being captured by Y S Jaganmohan Reddy of the YSRCP. I will return to this point again a little later.
Let me now give you the second of my examples. I suddenly found that was somebody was tweeting that I am a settler ghost writing articles in the Mumbai Indian Express and that I am coward since I did not put my name on that article. I couldn't make sense of that whole thing at all until it struck me that a couple of weeks before I tweeted a URL of an article written by Sanjaya Baru (I am not sure if it is him, but it was someone equally famous if it was not Sanjaya Baru) and that this was what the person was referring to as a ghost written article by me. I tried to tell him that I did not write it at all and then he tweeted with my blog's URL. I told him I am from Telangana and that I am not a settler, but the tweets from his side continued. The man believed me (presumably because he stopped tweeting after this) when I sent out three or four tweets saying that I am originally for Nayeem Nagar, Hanmakonda, Warangal and that my grand father had launched the Brahma Samaj movement there and also the Scouts and Guides movements in schools and that my great grand uncle was the Auditor General of the Nizam's treasury. It took about 10 tweets and some family history of mine to make the man stop tweeting about me. I don't know if he believed me or not but I am glad that he stopped tweeting. But in the meanwhile some three others retweeted his tweets and a few from the other side started their own tweets about the Telangana twitterati.
Then the third instance is the most bizarre. I had been asked to deliver a lecture on problems of representation which are inherent to democracy and why do they exist and what can they cause as things which are undemocratic. I went into the whole history of liberalism and how it was all about exclusion of people from decision making rather than inclusion and therefore despite the heightened pitch about inclusive politics, the model itself was not capable of supporting inclusive politics. I was saying that there is no accountability to politicians primarily because in a simple majority system those who voted against the winning candidate also get represented by him. Somehow this thing went into electoral politics and a lady kindly brought out the Telangana issue and how it could be seen as representing the people but it was the Coastal Andhra people who were not letting the Telangana representatives represent their constituents. I suggested that in such an instance when the representatives have stopped representing their constituents we could employ mechanisms such as referendum on an issue or recall of non-performing or badly performing elected representatives. Someone then decided to talk about Article 3. These were all teachers of Political Science and the way they were moving from one issue to the other was amazing. Then one man gets up and tell me it is enough (he is a colleague from my department) and tells everyone the session is over. Another persuades a couple of people who were discussing the constitution that they should also come out and bundled them all out. This too is a colleague of mine from the department in which I am employed. Then there was an old student who is now a colleague who also decided enough is enough. What is most interesting here is that I was scheduled to meet this group another time in a couple of days, and in the night I get a call from the coordinator that my lectures were postponed due to some reasons. I knew that this meant cancellation.
Later I was told that the three colleagues from the department were instrumental in cancelling my lectures since I was a settler!!! With this kind of intolerance among people what is the amity that we all live like brothers. One politician said we are only dividing territory not people. If people were not divided why would the question of division of territory come up at all. The general people may or may not be divided (there is no way of telling that with any certainty) but one thing is for sure that politicians are divided and to meet their targets they will divide whatever or whoever will come in the way. The Congress party by protracting the agitation for so long ensured that division percolated to all levels. The TDP supremo's two eyed theory culminated in two states. If he was against the division why did he give the letter of acceptance? He could have specified the terms and conditions on which he would agree to the division. Then there is the case of YSRCP. It was the Late Rajashekhar Reddy who instigated the separate Telangana movement in 1999 when he sent a delegation of elected representatives from the Congress to go to Delhi and ask for a separate Telangana. So why is his son protesting against the division? It is obvious that he seeks political gain. I personally believe that Chandra Babu Naidu may for once have spoken the truth when he said that in Telangana the TRS will merge with the Congress. That seems reasonable, given the speed (and lack of respect for democratic conventions) with which the Telangana Bill was passed. He is probably right when he says post election the YSRCP will merge with the Congress. This is all to shut him out. He could be right for once. That time will tell.
Meanwhile Mayawati wants to use the Telangana creation for bifurcation of UP into 4 more States. Gorkhaland agitators are getting ready to ask for a separate state and Mamata Banerjee is therefore saying that the process of Telangana creation was anti-constitutional. The really good thing to emerge out of all this is that it is now clear that the BJP and the Congress see eye to eye on many issues like smaller states (regionalism), communalism, casteism and any other divisions that are possible. The divisions are the ones that create spaces for politicians to emerge, rake up issues and later flourish. So to say people are not divided for me is nonsense. Politicians have been dividing people for various reasons for decades now and today that is there for all to see. It remains to be seen where all this will ultimately. One thing is for sure that our politicians are working overtime to prove Winston Churchill right, when at the time India became independent the man disdainfully said "India will remain an independent country but slowly it will come under the rule of scoundrels and all kinds of silly fellows whose goal will be anything but the well being of the people or the country".
Dear Reader, please do not take this as a commentary on the bifurcation of AP. It is not. I am also not lamenting anything other than the nature of politics and leadership in this country. The country requires leaders with vision of development and the will to serve the people, not the other way round. Sadly, what we have is the other way round. I am not going to make doomsday predictions. Like you, I will wait and see which this country goes in the coming few years.
