|
TELANGANA - A DIVISION OF ANDHRA PRADESH
MOILY AND SRC2
By M H AHSAN / Hyderabad
Veerappa Moily set a cat amongst the pigeons last week when he announced that the Congress was considering the constitution of a second States Reorganisation Commission. His words provoked strong reactions. From the Left parties, who pointed out that such a promise was not a part of the UPA’s Common Minimum Programme. And from Congressmen in Telangana who fear they would be upstaged by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, for the Congress would try and realign with the party with an eye to the 2009 polls.
Moily’s remarks cannot be taken lightly. He is the Congress functionary in-charge of Andhra Pradesh, the remark was made while he was in the state and because it is Moily who has made them. A favourite of the Prime Minister, who had appointed him as the head of the Administrative Reforms Commission, he has the ear of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi, his favoured status evident from the assignments he has been given — the head of the Congress’' Media department, is in charge of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, and now he is the chairman of the party’s committee to plan future strategies. He was instrumental in the removal of Jairam Ramesh from the convenorship of the committee, after Ramesh had reportedly circulated the phone numbers and email IDs of all members, including those of Rahul Gandhi.
The short and swift point is that if Moily says something today, it is to be taken seriously. It would certainly have the clearance of the Congress president. Clearly Moily and others — Digvijay Singh led a group to the Prime Minister to make a case for it — see the second SRC as a ploy which would help the Congress electorally in 2009. The moot question is: Will it?
Division of UP has been advocated by many outside the state as a way to right the skewed power balance in the country, which has favoured UP because of its size. They advance the argument of better development and governance, though experience has not necessarily gone to prove this and Jharkhand is one example of how a state should not be run. Many suspected former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao of deliberately allowing the Congress fortunes to dwindle in UP.
Whatever be the illusions the Congress harbours, the truth is that the two regional players, the BSP and the SP, now have a support base which is uniformly spread over different regions of the state, though Mulayam Singh Yadav may not be so well placed in Western UP. Mayawati says she is not opposed to the idea of dividing the state into Harit Pradesh in the west, Bundelkhand in the south and Poorvanchal in the east however, but hypothetically speaking, even if her party were to win in all the three states, it would have to have three chief ministers, whereas today she rules over the entire state.
The Congress feels division may clip Mayawati and Mulayam’s wings and improve its position in Bundelkhand and in Western UP with the possibility of a Gujjar-Muslim-some upper caste line-up.
A divided UP however may adversely affect the standing of the Nehru-Gandhi family which drew strength from belonging to the country’s largest state responsible for throwing up eight prime ministers, with Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee holding more than one term of office.
Then there is Vidarbha, the viability of which a second SRC would examine. There has been a demand for a separate state in this backward region of Maharashtra which has felt exploited and reported the maximum number of suicide deaths of farmers. By espousing the cause of statehood for Vidarbha, the Congress may win there, but it would hand over the rest of the state on a platter to the Shiv Sena.
The Samyukta Maharashtra movement, for retaining Bombay with Maharashtra, not letting it go to Gujarat, at the time of the creation of the two states, sowed the seeds of the Maharashtrian identity which later helped in the creation of Shiv Sena. Subsequently the party took up the sons of the soil slogan directing its ire against south Indians.
As of now, the Congress-NCP alliance may have a chance of coming back to power, because of the disarray in opposition ranks. There were two horrendous incidents last week in Maharashtra, of a 14-year -old Muslim girl who was gangraped and murdered in Udgir, and the eyes of a dalit boy in Nanded were gouged out because he dared to marry a Maratha girl, but neither the Sena nor the BJP could really put the Government on the mat even on issues such as these.
The Shiv Sena would get a new lease of life with any move to break up Maharashtra.
Even the NCP is not likely to support such a move. Given its history, any move to further divide Maharashtra is not likely to go down well in the rest of the state, and the Congress would be playing with fire.
As things stand, Andhra Pradesh could be the only consideration for contemplating SRC II. The movement in Telangana for a separate state has not waned. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi, which had an alliance with the Congress in 2004, parted company with it for its failure to create a separate Telangana.
Congress managers like Moily calculate that the only way to keep the state under the party’s belt would be to tie up again with the TRS. But this is not so simple for the TRS has already made it plain that it views the SRC II as a technique to delay the creation of a separate state.
In fact, the move may push the TRS in the arms of an eager BJP with LK Advani out to woo regional parties, and the BJP has supported the cause of a separate Telangana. As it is, the Congress is nervous about Mayawati’s entry into Andhra Pradesh and the possibility of her tying up with popular film star Chiranjeevi, or the more likely scenario of him launching his own regional party.
Moily’s statement is a trial balloon and so typical of the kind of politics the Congress is playing — tokenistic and ad hoc. It reflects the state of the party after the recent election reverses which indicate the Congress’ waning influence.
The party does not seem to have thought through the consequences of constituting another SRC at this juncture and the pandora’s box it could open. If it had, it would have first tried to generate a debate and an all-party consensus on the issue. It is not as if it feels that the time has come to have another look at the viability of the existing states to see where the boundaries could be redrawn. It is seeing it as a technique to win the election again in Andhra Pradesh. The party is just firing missiles in the dark hoping that some might just hit the bull’s eye. And it is disappointing politics, Mr Veerappa Moily.
| |
THE INSIDE STORY 
