TELANGANA: KCR’S CASTE HEADACHE
In a last-minute rejig, Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) chose Gadwal Vijayalakshmi as the mayor of Hyderabad on February 11, and named frontrunner Mothe Srilatha Reddy as her deputy. Though the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) was reneging on its promise that a woman from the influential Reddy community would be the new mayor, the party’s sub-par performance in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) polls is believed to have forced KCR’s hand. Vijayalakshmi’s appointment, the TRS hopes, will placate the irate backward classes, whose patience with the party seems to be wearing thin.
The GHMC urban agglomeration accounts for about a third of Telangana’s population and so it was imperative for KCR to signal to the backwards (who make up about 52 per cent of the state’s population) that their interests were still safe in his hands. The backwards cohort was in the forefront of the separate statehood campaign that KCR ran, and feel slighted that the TRS, which has been in power for seven years, has not yet ensured commensurate reservation in education/ jobs for them (they currently have 29 per cent reservation in the state).
In 2018, the high court of Telangana, on a petition filed by OBC leader and All India Congress Committee spokesperson Sravan Dasoju, asked the state to enumerate and conduct a socioeconomic study of the backward classes in the state. This was needed to categorise the communities (a longpending demand of the Most Backward Classes) and to raise reservation quotas according to their population. But the state is yet to act on it.
The National Backward Castes Welfare Association (NBCWA), an umbrella outfit of 16 backwards associations in the state, and a joint action committee of weavers and other backward sub-castes are now on the warpath. They are also trying to rope in the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe welfare associations to join the agitation (their quota is also not comparable to their population).
The ruling TRS is circumspect on the whole reservations issue, a case in point being the 10 per cent EWS (Economically Weaker Sections) quota for upper castes, implemented only recently even though the Centre had passed it two years ago. The party is also averse to antagonising any community, particularly the STs and Muslims whom KCR had promised quota enhancement from the present 6 and 4 per cent to 9.8 and 12 per cent, respectively. In April 2017, the state legislative assembly unanimously passed a bill to increase the quota for them. It was then communicated to the Union government to accord it constitutional validity, but nothing has happened since.
“The TRS has been the major beneficiary of backwards support in elections since 2014, but political representation for these communities has fallen from 20 per cent in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh to 14 per cent in Telangana now,” points out E. Venkatesu, professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad. “This has led to growing disaffection, and the backwards are slowly shifting to the BJP as seen in the recent Dubbaka assembly bypoll and the GHMC polls.”
To deflect attention, the TRS is blaming the Centre and is demanding the creation of an exclusive Backward Classes ministry at the national level and extending reservations for backwards in state legislatures and Parliament. In previous budget sessions, especially in 2018, TRS legislators
The TRS is circumspect on reservations; they only announced the 10% EWS quota for upper castes in the state recently although the Centre passed it two years ago
had staged dharnas in Parliament demanding the states be given powers to enhance reservations based on demographics. On his part, KCR has also written to the Centre to allow states to decide the percentage of reservations to be extended to deserving communities. As a constitutional amendment is required for increasing quotas, KCR has also raised the Tamil Nadu example, saying if the latter was able to implement 69 per cent reservation through a constitutional amendment, the same should be extended to Telangana.
Meanwhile, the opposition says KCR is raising these concerns only to corner the votes of the marginalised sections. “He comes up with big announcements before the elections and forgets it after getting their votes,” says state BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar, pointing out how KCR has been announcing the construction of BC bhavans in Hyderabad since his first term as chief minister but is yet to demarcate land for it. “The demand for a separate ministry at the national level does exist but give Prime Minister Narendra Modi credit for according constitutional status to the National OBC Commission in his first term. The BJP believes it is larger than just a ministry,” says party spokesperson Krishna Sagar Rao.
The NBCWA wants KCR to take his cue from the Bombay High Court verdict on the reservation for Marathas, which took the state’s total reservation beyond the Supreme Court-mandated cap of 50 per cent. The overall quota now stands at 62 per cent in jobs and 63 per cent in education in Maharashtra. It also points out how Telangana recently added 17 new sub-castes to the BC list but did nothing to increase the reservation quota. “KCR has no commitment to the cause of the marginalised. If he had, wouldn’t he have taken measures to improve their numbers in his party and in the state government?” asks Sravan, pointing to the TRS party tickets for the assembly/ Lok Sabha elections. “He is happy using the marginalised as vote machines,” he adds.
Telangana is the only state in India yet to adopt the 123rd constitutional amendment bill (2017) and 102nd amendment (2018), through which the government of India converted the National Commission for Backward Classes as a constitutional body under Article 338B of the Constitution. Neighbouring states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have adopted the amendments and accorded constitutional status to their state BC commissions. Ironically, Telangana has also not reconstituted the state BC Commission though 16 months have passed since the term of the last team got over.
In the absence of a BC Commission, community members now have no devoted forum to submit their grievances even as cases of violations mount. “Taking advantage of the defunct BC Commission, several universities and educational institutions and even government departments in Telangana are openly violating the BC reservation criteria for recruitments, admissions to law and PhD programmes, seats in MBBS courses and so on,” alleges Sravan. The state, he demands, must adopt the constitutional amendments to accord the prescribed status to the BC Commission, constitute it with competent people and empower it to check violations. He also wants the state Backward Classes Finance Corporation to sanction loans to the deserving among all the 113 backward castes in the state, rather than limiting it to a select few.