Perhaps starting this blog was a significant mistake of mine. Even though I have decided that there is no point in continuing the conversation about Telangana people keep asking me questions and since I have started something, I feel obliged to continue it and answer questions that people ask. Here are some of my thoughts on what people have asked.
The last few days have been of significance in the State of Andhra Pradesh where life has been paralysed or crippled depending on where one lives. If you are in Telangana the strike that has been launched by the employees of the Government of Andhra Pradesh in the Telangana region is most mystifying. Those of you who read my blog will remember that I once quoted my father on development in Telangana and how my views and his do not match on the question of separate Telangana. I even said that he was the Coordinator of Gazetted Officers supporting a separate Telangana in 1969. If you are wondering why I am getting autobiographical again, here is the reason. I asked my father as to what the justification was for gazetted or non gazetted employees seeking a separate Telangana. His answer was that an overwhelming number of employees in the government were from the Coastal Andhra region and that they had a superior complex and spoke deprecatingly of the local Telangana people. I am aware that post that agitation, Andhra Pradesh has been divided into zones and all employees up to that of the gazetted level are drawn from within the local zones. This local zone employment has also come into universities and other quasi government bodies. So my question is why and what for are the non gazetted employees of Telangana agitating for? (This time I have spared my father of this question mainly because he is now an octogenarian and a government employee who retired more than twenty years ago). Why is the separate State so important to the government employees, so much so that they are willing to not work and inconvenience common people?
The answer to that question lies in unions. The existence of various unions among employees is essentially an advantage and a disadvantage for political parties. If they are in government, unions are disadvantageous mainly but if they are in the opposition then they can be of great use. Union leaders can be used for the creation of strikes that are crippling. In the case of the APSRTC, the unions and mainly the National Mazdoor Union are using this as an opportunity to regularize the services of ad hoc and contract employees. The coal miners are agitating for something that I do not know, but they are not working exclusively for Andhra Pradesh since thermal power plants in Andhra Pradesh and in the Telangana region are synchronized with national grids and the lack of adequate power generation is not problem for people of this region alone. Anyway, this strike has meant power cuts lasting more than 12 hours in villages of Telangana and that has been the scourge of farmers who require their pumpsets to run for the saving of the crops. The APSRTC has accumulated losses and this strike which is making the corporation lose crores of rupees everyday will ensure that the corporation will never recover and will ultimately become a burden on the tax payers.
In all this clamour there are some people who claim that Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar have supported a separate Telangana. I think some air must be cleared here. Linguistic states as an idea found support from Mahatma Gandhi but not from Nehru and Ambedkar. It was the desire of Ambedkar to leave the State of Hyderabad as it was and he believed that having a relatively developed city like Hyderabad as the capital of a state that had the Marathwada region (now in Maharashtra), the Gulbarga region and the Bidar region (now in Karnataka) would be good for the development of the whole region. In the reorganization of states these regions have now been integrated into other states. So where is the relevance of quoting Ambedkar over this. Similarly Nehru had reservations about how composite states based in language would be. He was in that context talking about how a developed Coastal Andhra region which was under the erstwhile Madras Presidency could dominate the undeveloped Telangana region. The Madras Presidency has also since been divided into many regions and once N T Rama Rao famously said that Madras (now Chennai) should never have been given to Tamil Nadu since it had an overwhelming number of Telugu speaking people. My problem with the idea of Separate Telangana has always been this. It cannot be seen as a stand alone issue.
This is where myopic and uneducated leaders step in to queer the pitch. The problem of this country is mainly that politics have become the exclusive prerogative of muscle and the money that it supports. Today there are people in sitting in the United States of America arguing about how Coastal Andhra people have colonized Telangana. If the Americans were to fear the colonizing of America by Indians then that gets categorized as Xenophobia by these very same people. I would like to see how many of them would be comfortable with "Indians go back". In all this filth and muck the future of the poor and their children is that which is taking a severe beating because they can never emigrate elsewhere or send their children to other states [(including the United States:-))] and they will be pushed back a few more years and recovering from that pushing back will not be possible. The education system of this country which is manned by illiterates and scoundrels who want to perpetuate caste politics, is not helping matters.
What is most disturbing is how political parties are least bothered about people but playing games of one-upmanship. The CPI (M)'s Prakash Karat has questioned the Central Government's indecision and has flayed its attempt to convene all political parties again after the Sri Krishna Committee has consulted all political parties and given out the option of leaving the State of Andhra Pradesh as it is and creating separate legally binding autonomous councils for Telangana with special extra funding as the best one. This is understandable since the CPI (M) has been maintaining that it does not support bifurcation. But what confounded me completely was Harish Rao of TRS also saying the same thing. When I talked about this a very enlightened social scientist has said that Sri Krishna Committee has also given the option of a Separate Telangana with Hyderabad as Capital and that this should be pursued. But that was not the ideal option, as per the committee I said and was told "for us that is the ideal option". Enough said. I leave it to you dear reader to draw your conclusions. I cannot claim that my line of thinking is the best and don't intend to either. Like I said, I belong to Telangana and have only ever lived in Telangana so I can continue. My concern is about what parochialism and fissiparous tendencies can do to the future my country.
P.S: Not proof read. Please excuse errors.
