This time around, the clamour for a separate Telangana state appears a bit more serious than it was in the last couple of years. Much more than the theatrics of the TRS chief, Chandrasekhara Rao, it is the involvement of students and the undesirable, but fairly widespread violence in that region, that should cause some worry to politicians from the Andhra region in that state.
The TRS chief had lost some credibility in the recent past as he seemed to strike political compromises more tuned to electoral politics than the cause of statehood. Though his effort to revive the movement now is viewed with cynicism, the latent desire of the people in that region seems to have burst open all of a sudden.
Telangana is a difficult issue to handle for any party in power. It has all the ingredients –– a sense of neglect and emotional discontent for whatever reason –– that have been sufficiently fuelled by politicians from that region. It has remained an issue that is both dormant and live in alternate spells from the time of independence. At the time of reorganisation of states, people of Telengana, it appears, were not keen on being part of the larger Andhra state.
The Congress leadership, including Jawaharlal Nehru, thought otherwise and that is one reason the clamour for separation has somehow survived.
Most political parties in Andhra and at the national level appear to have come round to the view that creation of Telangana is inevitable. All of them have publicly acknowledged this. That is probably a contributory factor for the sudden and renewed effort to press home the point in that region. The Congress, in particular, will have some difficulty in handling this emotive issue.
If it were to concede the demand for carving out Telangana, it is quite likely that similar demands could come up in other states as well. After Uttaranchal, Chattisgarh and Jharkand were carved out of UP, MP and Bihar, it would be difficult for the political establishment to slow down or completely halt the process of formation of smaller states. Within Andhra Pradesh, the Congress and the Telugu Desam seem less enthusiastic in agreeing to bifurcation of the state. That, in itself, complicates matters because carving out a state is much more than redrawing the map. Political and economic contours of the reshaped provinces will have a great deal of bearing on the issue.
It is not as if formation of Telangana is round the corner. In the past, the state has dealt with a concerted agitation and violence more than once without really agreeing for separation. The revival of the movement, however, is probably a good opportunity to take a look at reorganisation of the states that came about, following the recommendations of the states reorganisation commission about sixty years ago.
Reorganisation on the basis of language alone does not seem to have helped. Telangana is a case in point. Hyderabad-Karnataka region in Karnataka is a similar case. Though, in both cases, language ought to have been a cementing factor, the two regions somehow entertain a sense of neglect in economic terms, even if the state government were not deliberately remiss on this score. There may be more of such regions in the country that would happily part from the bigger state of which they are now a composite part on the basis of language alone.
Formation of smaller states may be worthwhile, purely from an administrative perspective. It might even answer the emotional deficit a large community feels, as in the case of the Telangana region. There is, however, little empirical evidence to show that smaller states can do better economically. Also, the complexities of dividing resources, particularly in some vital areas such as sharing of natural resources, can complicate matters.
Sharing river waters has the potential to become contentious even in the case of Telangana. These, one may argue, are issues that will get sorted over time, even if they appear pretty difficult to resolve now. In any case, there is a great deal of consensus among politicians of all shades within Telangana on the need for statehood.
That being the case, it is quite easy to stoke the emotional fire and get a wider section of the population involved in the agitation.
On its part, the Congress government seems to have committed a strategic mistake in treating the current agitation as a law and order problem.
It cannot be put down by extensive use of state power. It has to be dealt with politically – like Indira Gandhi did in 1969 by addressing the emotional neglect of the region by co-opting leaders of the Telangana movement into the Congress. In the long run, however, that did not seem to work. Chief minister Rosiah, who has been around in politics for quite a while, surely knows that as well as anyone else does. It is probably time to yield to the people of that region and let them decide how they want to be identified.
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