A warning: How not to ramrod Parliament into dividing a state
And a reminder: Not every voter in Telangana is pro-Telangana.
TELANGANA CANNOT SAVE CONGRESS
How far it is democratically correct and constitutionally tenable to force the Telangana division on the unwilling people of Andhra Pradesh remains unclear. A government, which fully squandered its popular mandate a long time ago, and clings to office due to the technicality of the fiveyear electoral cycle, ought not to have inflicted this legislative atrocity on the nation, at least not in its dying days. If democracy is all about counting heads, the Congress leadership merely counted those whom it considers its potential saviours in the coming elections in the yet- to- be- born state, while it most contemptuously thumbed its nose at the far more numerous objectors in the Seemandhra region. Survival of the party trumped the larger interests of the Telugu people.
That the diabolic division of Andhra might saddle the new government in New Delhi with an unnecessary headache is of no concern to the Congress high command. After all, when it is nearly certain that they are not coming back, how does it matter if the next government is left with a bigger mess than it has already created all around? The demand for more new states is bound to get a second wind following the ramrodding of the Telangana Bill in Parliament.
Without doubt, the Telangana episode is a lesson not only in how not to create a new state but also in how not to force legislation down the gullets of unwilling MPs. The sight of the Prime Minister reading a drab statement in the Rajya Sabha with a group of burly MPs making a protective ring around him is an apt comment on how the hon’ble members have profaned the sanctum sanctorum of Indian democracy. Did we hear you say that urchins behave better than hon’ble members? If after years of on- now, off- now waffling, the Congress leadership finally seized upon Telangana as its electoral lifeboat, it may again have erred grievously. For, it is wrong to assume that only pro-Telangana voters reside in Telangana. Last time Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress forced a popular vote on the Telangana question, expectedly, his party swept the Seemandhra region in the byelections. But, more significantly, its candidate in the lone byelection in Telangana barely lost by a thousand votes. So, it is not going to be smooth-sailing for the Congress even in those 17 Lok Sabha seats, though it can have no hope in hell of winning a single seat in the Seemandhra region.
Besides, Telangana Rashtra Samithi boss, K. Chandrashekar Rao, is unlikely to foreclose his options for a better bargain by either merging his outfit with the Congress or yielding too many seats in a pre-election arrangement. The usual electoral arithmetic would come into play in Telangana as it would in Seemandhra, with the multiplier effect determining the winner in multi- cornered contests. Given the presence of a sizable section of the minority vote in Telangana, and Asaduddin Owaisi’s Ittehadule-Muslimeen’s electoral pact with the YSR Congress, the Congress, in fact, might be in for a shock even in the Telangana region. What is that they say in the local lingo about jootey bhi khaye, pyaj bhi khaye?
FREE-FOR-ALL IN AAP’S DELHI
If you are a keen observer of things around you, and happen to live in the national capital, you could not have missed the fresh signs of nearanarchy. The 49 days of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal have left the city in a greater mess than at anytime before. The rise of the Aam Aadmi Party has emboldened others to sidestep the law while they go about grabbing public land, running unregistered motorised vehicles and generally showing little respect to the established authority. Thanks to Kejriwal’s unconventional street politics, there is a sharp spurt in illegal activities all around.
Squatting on public land has resumed with a new gusto, with jhuggis coming up within a handshake distance of the police stations. For proof, look no further than the park facing the landmark Humayun’s Tomb or in front of the hitherto vacant land in front of the Lodhi Road cremation ground. As for the city roads, the oddly- shaped Chinesemade contraptions running on batteries, and packed like sardines with human cargo, bear no registration numbers whatsoever. These are not even certified roadworthy by the Transport Department. Yet, they now compete with other regular vehicles for the ever narrowing space on the busiest thoroughfares.
These squatters and the owners of the battery-run vehicles may well be AAP voters, but that cannot be reason enough for the au- thorities to ignore their illegal actions. It took years to remove illegal tenements from public spaces. A new wave of illegal slums would scar the city permanently, especially with AAP relying on them to boost its votebank. As it is, there are a lot of middle class consumers of water and electricity who are inspired by Kejriwal and Co. to believe that paying bills is not a good thing after all. Delhi, the city beautiful, is sorrier with the advent of AAP.
GEMS FROM RAHULJI
Thank god, there are still some journalists around who are not over-awed by the show of power and pelf. The other day, Rahul Gandhi was in Bangalore. And his media minders summoned the city’s top editors for an off- the- record powwow with him. The ground rules were clearly set. No cameras, no cell phones, no taperecorders. Yes, you can report the gems that come out of the great man’s mouth, but credit it not to him but to unnamed “senior Congress sources”. Everyone barring one editor did as told. However, the editor of a leading Kannada paper chose to privilege loyalty to his readers ahead of any PR concerns of the Congress’ vice- president. Next day, he had a six-column story on the front page, recount- ing what he had seen and heard in the 45- minute interaction with the Congress’s Prince.
Wrote he, “It is nice to see and hear Rahul Gandhi’s words, but they are impractical.” And went on to report that when Gandhi repeatedly “spoke of inner-party democracy, and the requirement for a new atmosphere, a new system and a new culture in the party, The Times of India’s Washington correspondent Chidanand Rajghatta (who hails from Bangalore and happened to be in the city) said to Rahul: ‘We have been hearing the same words, since the party’s Bombay national executive meeting, for the last 25 years. But the party has remained the same and the dinosaurs have survived.’ For a moment, Rahul was stumped, and then said maybe Chidanand should not have used the word ‘dinosaurs’.”
Following his famous interview with Times Now’s Arnab Goswami, the media managers of Rahul Gandhi had decided to give the capital’s print and television journalists a miss and, instead, concentrate on the regional media. Clearly, the assumption was that that the regional media is easier to manage and, in fact, would be suitably deferential. But whether it is Delhi or Jhumri Tallaiya, it is hard for Rahulji to hide his intellectual prowess. Small wonder, then, at a similar interaction earlier in Bhubaneswar he left his interlocutors highly unimpressed. One editor summed up the time spent with Rahul as “highly boring”.