Telangana: The Question of Internal Colonization

Formation of a separate state of Telangana in 2014 was a very difficult decision to take. It meant siding with a political group that was weaker in terms of money power and political presence. All the lobbying by the Joint Action Committee in the heyday of the Telangana movement could have been scuttled, even if not very easily. It needed an extraordinary sense of history and some sense of justice for the decision to be taken against a very powerful lobby run by the leaders of coastal Andhra. However, the lack of clarity on why Telangana was created and whether or not this was the best way to resolve the long-standing complaint of backwardness and ‘internal colonization’ is perhaps apparent in the manner in which the Congress party went about it once it decided to create a separate state of Telangana. Jairam Ramesh, in his book, Old Histories, New Geographies provides an account of how the decisions regarding the modalities of bifurcation came to be taken. While there is some acknowledgment that his party recognized the backwardness of Telangana, the process he narrates and the decisions that came to be taken do not, however, seem to be guided by the commitment to undoing a historical wrong.

The decisions seem to have been taken by treating Telangana and coastal Andhra at par. What, then, was the pressure to form a separate state?

This, in a sense, gets reflected in Ramesh’s concluding observation that, ‘In the successor state of Andhra Pradesh, I am still considered a villain and in the state of Telangana, I am believed to have bent over backwards to appease Seemandhra sentiments’.¹⁰ This is a rather candid admission, which was reflected in the political fortunes of the Congress in the assembly elections in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014. The party was nearly wiped out in Andhra Pradesh and fared worse than expected in Telangana.

Demand for a Separate State

The nuts and bolts narration in this book sheds light on how tenuous the situation was—even after a long period of consultations. There was a possibility that the decision could fail to come through at many stages, including when a Congress MP decided to use pepper spray to disturb the proceedings.

Ramesh narrates quite a few interesting incidents where he had to convince his own party members, who were up in arms, both inside and outside Parliament. In one particular incident, BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu decided to move three or four amendments to the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill, 2014, in the Rajya Sabha. Ramesh writes, ‘My heart sank when I heard this. If these amendments were to pass, the government would be in a serious bind and we would have to go back to the Lok Sabha for approval. And there was no time for that’.¹¹

He further sheds light on the various meetings that took place as part of the working of the GoM. The proceedings included debates on special status to Andhra Pradesh, role and powers of the governor, status of Hyderabad, education and Article 371-D, Polavaram dam and issues of displacement, managing water resources, and internal security concerns. Here, one gets a sense of the opposing concerns and claims and how the Group of Ministers (GoM) managed to arrive at a decision. Given the birth pangs that the formation of the state underwent, it is only imperative to ask if the issue of backwardness got addressed with the formation of Telangana. Did it meet the demands and expectations of the various social groups who aspired for a smaller state? Do smaller states lead to more equality or even a better quality of life for the majority of population groups?

How Is Telangana Doing?

The state was formed after a prolonged agitation and popular protest, largely as a fall out of the deep agrarian crisis, growing unemployment, and cultural denigration. We need to ask how Telangana is doing now.

The most visible change has been in the situation regarding power supply. The power supply that was not only irregular but also contributed to the agrarian crisis has improved dramatically. Today, all villages get uninterrupted power supply to the households and for six hours for the agricultural purposes, which the new government has promised to increase to nine in the next few months and 24/7 free from 2018 onwards.

The government, immediately after assuming power, announced a loan waiver up to `1 lakh per family. However, this was waived in instalments of 25% every six months. According to the farmers that I met in course of a survey, this has not really helped them to get rid of the loans, and instead, they continue to reel under debts as most of the waiver is being used to pay the interests and the principal amount is being repaid only partially in small amounts. Further, they pointed out that there is no policy for providing support price or subsidies on inputs such as fertilizers, and no compensation being provided for crop failure.

Agrarian Crisis

Water continues to be a major problem in much of Telangana. Most of the projects are either contested in the water tribunal, or many of the pending ones have not been cleared or completed. The government has instead taken up the project called ‘Mission Kakatiya’ under which old lakes, ponds, and other water bodies that had dried up are re-dug, hoping that a good monsoon will fill them up. In a few districts, free borewells are being supplied but the ground water level is too low (in most cases bores go as deep as 800 metre to strike water). Similarly, under ‘Mission Bhagiratha’, the Telengana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government has promised to provide tap water for every household. Labour and wages remain the other major problems in the agrarian sector. While wages have not risen for the landless after the formation of Telangana, farmers holding land continue to complain about the lack of the availability of labour making agriculture untenable.

Many of the farmers now demand that the labour under the rural job scheme (MNREGA) needs to be shifted for agricultural purposes instead of other developmental activities, which they believe in any case, are not of much use. The policy of Re 1 per kg rice scheme with 6 kg of rice per person is a very effective scheme providing great relief to the BPL families. Along with the rice scheme, the government’s pension scheme is also popular in the rural hinterlands of Telangana. The new government has increased the pension amount from `200 to `1,000. In the last one year, after the formation of Telangana, close to 900 farmers have committed suicides, next only to Maharashtra where 2,568 farmers committed suicide.

The agrarian crisis was the single most important reason why the demand for Telangana erupted. Questions need to be raised if it continues to be of priority for the new government. While it has disbursed a range of welfare-oriented policies (much of which are a continuation of the policies formulated by the previous Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s government), the agrarian crisis is yet to be averted and it needs some pressing and fast-paced steps from the government to stop further suicides.

Populist Policies

Similarly, alongside the farmers are the Muslims, the other social group that remains marginalized in Telangana. Under the YSR government, Muslims were awarded 4% reservation as part of the OBC reservations. The TRS government has promised to enhance it to 12%. The Subramanium Committee, instituted in 2007, had identified 28 groups out of which 14 groups were made ineligible for reservation due to their superior social status, including sects such as Sheiks, Sayeeds, and Pathans.

These, in a sense, are perhaps the few communities that can afford higher education but having been denied the provision of reservation, we find almost 80% dropouts among Muslims. There is an impending need to provide educational loans and build social welfare hostels, which contributed in a big way towards improving literacy among the SC/STs. The most popular policy that has struck a chord among the Muslims is ‘Shaadi Mubarak’ where the government offers `50,000 to perform the marriage of girls from the economically weaker sections (the Hindu counterpart ‘Kalyana Laxmi’, with similar grant).

Most of the Muslims continue to be self-employed and without landholding in the rural hinterlands of Telangana. They continue to live under conditions of social segregation, fear, and many a time are implicated in false cases of crime. Culturally, Telangana had a strong Sufi tradition, and even today, besides Muslims, a large number of Hindus visit dargahs. Perhaps, political parties such as the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) are not the best representatives of this tradition. It is a literal everyday tussle between the social and political worlds. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao performed Chandi Yaga at a whopping cost of ?7 crore. In order to balance his pro-Muslim policies, he has also appointed a Muslim as the deputy chief minister (CM). It is also a move to capture the space that the BJP-RSS combine has been laboriously building with manufactured issues of Charminar being built over the destruction of a temple and recalling the memory of Nizam’s rule and role of Razakars in wantonly using physical force against the Hindus.

Smaller states like Telangana have given an immediate relief but the major issues remain the same as in any other state, including the issue of farmer suicides, jobless growth, and growing economic inequality between social groups and regions. Today in Telangana, farmers and students are the unhappy lot. Current TRS government has an ongoing conflict with the students of Osmania University who were the backbone of the struggle for a separate state. Smaller states have also weakened the federal set-up instead of strengthening it. It has led to a strong centre and weak states undermining their bargaining capacity depending on their financial clout and the number of Members of parliament (MPs) they send to the parliament. This is true of Andhra Pradesh too that has been struggling for a ‘special status’. Smaller states work in halting the centralization of capital and wealth among a few castes, and it redistributes the wealth within the regional elite and creates nominal opportunities for the rural and urban poor. It shifts the hold from ‘internal colonization’ of one region over the other but seems to have no means of addressing more structural of issues. Why is it that in spite of colonization being questioned, it does not yield to an alternative model of development? The question of ‘internal colonization’ remains a very relevant issue in India since the days of reorganization of states.