Wrecked APart
Congress in its desperation to honour its word ahead of the general election, rushed through the Reorganisation of Andhra Pradesh Bill (2013) in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday and will push for its adoption in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday. In the process, it has not only divided southern India’s largest state, but also fractured itself and ended its rule of AP of a decade. What is worse, it will go into history books as a case of a state for Telugus created in controversial circumstances, coming unstuck also under controversial circumstances – by overriding the state legislature’s rejection of the division – to renew doubts about the justification for linguistic states as administrative units of the republic when cultural, social and economic factors can upset things, not to mention parochial politics.
AP was created in the 1956 reorganisation of states, by joining Telugu-speaking parts of the princely state of Hyderabad under the Nizam (the rest going to Maharashtra and Karnataka) with Telugu-speaking northern parts of the Madras Presidency and the coastal region between Orissa and Tamilnadu. If Nizam’s Hyderabad had to be forced to join the Indian Union after Independence, its Telangana successors too needed nudging to forge a united state for Telugus, insecure as they were about their economic and social status before those from Andhra and Rayalaseema regions. By 1969 a bloody political movement for separation was launched by the Telangana Praja Samiti, which proved a point in regional elections too. The Congress, which was powerful at the Centre then, contained that rebellion by assimilating the party. But after the emergence of the Telugu Desam (TDP) of N T Rama Rao and later his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu, its grip began to loosen although it sent a Prime Minister to Delhi. A breakaway group from TDP under K Chandrasekhar Rao in 2001 revived the agitation for Telangana, which has now culminated in Rayalaseema (13 districts) and Telangana (10 districts) parting ways.
This division was a promise on which Mr Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti allied with the Congress in the 2004 general election, when it recovered from the ignominy of 9 Lok Sabha seats in 1999 (TDP was with BJP in the NDA) by winning 29 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats. But the power of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy as chief minister stalled the division and Mr Rao quit the UPA in two years. The Congress improved its position to 33 seats in the 2009 Lok Sabha election, but the death of Mr Reddy came as a set-back and the Congress high command’s need to keep his son Jagan Mohan in check, by foisting Kiran Kumar Reddy as CM, led to the late CM’s loyalists breaking away as YSR Congress and doing well in the assembly election. In this weakened condition, the TRS chose to press the issue and the Congress buckled.
Congress which lost YSR loyalists has now lost Kiran Kumar Reddy loyalists too in its gamble for 17 Lok Sabha seats of Telangana, hoping TRS will keep its word of merging with it. BJP and others which were ambivalent on Telangana or were against the division, will have the 23 Seemandhra seats of the two disgruntled ex-Congress groups and TDP to bargain for in the next Lok Sabha. The birth of the country’s 29th state, sadly, is a tale of a distress sale by a disunited family where everyone hoped to be a gainer but ended up a losing their honour along with the family silver. Will this saga lead to the call for more little states to satisfy parochial interests, is what the country should watch out for.
