Telangana: Politics sans commonsense

Feb 2010

Telangana has been on the boil for most part of the month. Students’ agitation and bandhs, often accompanied by violence, have crippled life in the region and brought the entire state machinery to a standstill. The council of ministers can’t meet because earlier the ministers belonging to Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra kept away protesting against the Centre’s go-ahead to the statehood for Telangana and then, when the Centre retracted its statement, those belonging to Telangana put in their papers. There are no indications that things would improve in a hurry.

Though the Centre has called a meeting with all political parties of Andhra Pradesh next week to arrive at a consensus, it has to be squarely blamed for creating the mess in the first place. Political prevarications that saw the UPA changing its stand on statehood time and again endures. That is the worrying part.

Is the Centre for smaller state? We don’t know. The Congress, which leads the UPA government, has kept changing its position. In 2004, it suited the party’s interest and hence it promised statehood for Telangana and forged an electoral alliance with the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti. But after forming the government, the Congress went back on its stand. It woke up to promise statehood again when the news came that TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao, who was on fast to press for statehood, was critical. When it evoked a strong protest, even from Congress’ own legislators, the government decided to put the statehood on hold and began a consultation process.

It is not difficult to resolve the issue. All it requires is to stop the politics of deception. It is easy to see why smaller states are eminently desirable. All statehood demands in recent past have emerged for economic reasons. When people started agitating for Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand, their main grouse was gross lack of development in those regions. After the statehood was granted, these new states have shown remarkable progress. Their GDP has grown at a much faster rate. The annual growth rate for the past five years is much better than rest of the country—9.3% for Uttarakhand, 8.45% for Jharkhand and 7.3% for Chhattisgarh.) These were once part of Bimaru states. There is no reason to believe that the situation would be any different if Telangana gets statehood.

It makes political sense too. Political stability may have eluded Jharkhand but people of the region feel more empowered. They are playing a direct role in forming their governments. Earlier, they voted for parties and candidates and waited for political machinations in Patna, a faraway place, to see who formed the government. They could only hope for more representation in the council of ministers so that projects and programmes benefitting them could be pushed harder. No more. Same is with Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand. You don’t hear people grumbling and complaining of neglect. They stand to gain more by way of development work and employment opportunity. When Jharkhand was part of Bihar and the Subarnarekha dam project took off, most of the jobs meant for displaced people actually went to north Biharis. Such injustice is unthinkable now.

From administrative point of view too, smaller states make sense. Look at Chhattisgarh. It is still struggling to build roads, schools, hospitals, police stations and other infrastructure. Most of the Bastar region is devoid of all these. The government exists only in district towns and blocks. Some blocks are not even approachable. So long as the party in power in Bhopal did not feel threatened, nobody cared for a remote region like Chhattisgarh. The case of Telangana is no different.

Why does then the UPA government prevaricate on the statehood issue? It has begun consultation process for Telangana, but is steadfastly refusing to listen to those agitating for Gorkhaland. Irrespective of resolution of the Telangana issue, more and more demands for statehood would start. More agitation would mean more disruption, loss of life and loss of public assets. Commonsense would tell that the simple way to tackle the clamour for statehood would be to set up a new State Reorganisation Commission and implement its recommendation. But then, who says commonsense makes sound politics!