There are no votes in despair
Between 1757 and 1857 the British patched together an Indian empire full of geographical odds but with one logical end: an administrative map which maximised their security and trade, rather than reflected what people wanted. Blaming the British is pointless. They ruled India for Britain’s benefit, not India’s.
Robert Clive is justly famous for winning Bengal, but an equally significant achievement of his time was conquest of the Andhra coastal belt, called the Northern Circars, in 1758-59. The Nizam of Hyderabad had ceded this region to the French, who promptly lost it to the British. Clive’s strategic interest was to control the coast, and establish a land route between the premier British trading cities, Calcutta and Madras, strengthening the defences of both. He knew its value from experience. In 1756, when Clive set out to recapture Calcutta, seized by Siraj ud Daula and renamed Alinagar, his fleet was forced to sail from Madras via Ceylon and Burma to the Hooghly river in Bengal.
The Mughal map had deeper roots in local history and ethnicity, because Mughal expansion, after Akbar, sought to assimilate as much as to acquire. A regional dynasty was permitted to rule over its fief as long as it accepted the Mughal emperor as overlord. The identification between land and people in princely India was deeper, thanks to continuity and feudal tradition. When free India sought a new internal map, based on the will of the people, most disputes emerged from British India, and why would they not when Sind and Gujarat were ruled from Marathi Bombay, and half of Andhra from Tamil Madras?
The Circars were not included in the new state of Andhra Pradesh when it was formed after the end of the Nizam. It required massive protests, and a fast-unto-death that actually ended in death to correct the absurdity of keeping Andhras out of Andhra Pradesh. But poisonous tensions embedded in that initial mistake could never be buried because they had never died. Telengana, consisting of the poorer districts of the Nizamate, soon convinced itself that its progress was being sabotaged by economic aggression of the old Circars. By the 1970s a popular movement, also known as the “mulki struggle”, took shape, spurred by the thought that demonstrations and fasts could change a decision in a democratic polity.
Of Andhra’s myriad chief ministers, spanning the scale from heroic to useless, only one man seemed to understand that if the problem was economic, then the solution did not have to be political. He was Y. Rajashekhar Reddy, father of Jagan Reddy, and, ironically, the Congress leader who could legitimately claim to be close to Mrs Sonia Gandhi. The demand for Telengana all but evaporated over his six years as CM because he delivered development.
The casualty rate in public life rises not from murder, but suicide. In an astonishing blunder four years ago, a little after Rajashekhar died in a tragic helicopter accident, P. Chidambaram, then home minister, revived a comatose conflict by offering Telengana. Since then, everyone has suffered grievously because of this mistake, except the man who made it.
One of the great mysteries of the present UPA government has been its phenomenal indifference to public rage. It lined up a team of ministers, headed by Kapil Sibal, to sneer at Anna Hazare. Today, Andhra Pradesh is in cinders. What is the response of its top leaders? Mrs Sonia Gandhi emerges now and then to scold the BJP and returns to silence. Rahul Gandhi is deeply concerned about Jupiter velocity touched in the head by lunar sagacity. And Dr Manmohan Singh stops by in Delhi to implement some Rahul Gandhi diktat before he boards again a fast plane to somewhere far, far away. Andhra? It could be on another planet; and if Digvijay Singh has been left in charge, it probably has reached stratosphere in any case.
Political malpractice punishes the nation more than it does any ruling party. Has anyone measured the economic cost of Andhra’s meltdown after Chidambaram’s blunder? How much of our GDP have we lost in the last four years? And how much has gross domestic bitterness grown?
There will never be unanimity over Telengana, but the quality governance is measured by the management of change. Far from ensuring peace, Congress has itself splintered. Some solutions being suggested are downright stupid, like declaring Hyderabad as a common capital. Hyderabad is over 100 kilometres from the border of Seemandhra. In 1948 Nehru and Patel had sufficient credibility to take a decision through Cabinet on new states. They left the call to a judge and a commission.
You cannot toss a bomb into the air, get out of the way, watch who gets hit on the street and then pick up votes from the debris. There are no votes in despair.
Mobashar Jawed Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Guardian. He has also served as Editorial Director of India Today.