No Telangana here An ongoing protest in Anantapur. (Photograph by AP)
A
shared Hyderabad is causing some grief in Tollywood too. The epicentre of the
Telugu film industry, the city boasts studios such as Ramoji Film City,
Annapoorna, Rama Naidu, Saradhi and Padmalaya and is home to most Telugu stars
and filmmakers. Though 50 per cent of Tollywood’s revenues come from what is
called the Nizam territory (Telangana districts), the film industry is ruled
by coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema. Daggubati Suresh, film producer and brother
of star Venkatesh, rues that the Telugu people have lost their political voice.
“Smaller pieces find it difficult to survive since there are no economies of
scale. We’ll have to live with whatever’s given and hope the Telugu film
industry stays united,” he says.
Telangana
Joint Action Committee chairman M. Kodandaram admits having a common capital
will remain a bugbear. But the weightier concerns of power generation and
supply or of water-sharing will be easier to address, he feels, because
previous committees have looked into them.
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It
was Jawaharlal Nehru who had described the 1956 merger of Telangana with
Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra as the marriage of a reluctant bride. The States
Reorganisation Commission had advised against the move, on grounds that the
people of Telangana would be swamped by those from the coastal regions. But
Andhra Pradesh came into being, with a gentleman’s agreement of special
safeguards for Telangana. Intermittent agitations for the honouring of those
safeguards came to naught.
Finally,
for a struggle which for long was also a fight against feudalism, it took an
upper-caste Velama, K. Chandrasekhara Rao, to set up the Telangana Rashtra
Samiti in 2001, and his 10-day fast in 2009 for the Telangana agitation to pick
up steam and force then home minister P. Chidambaram to make an announcement
on December 9 of that year and for the Congress now to give it shape.
Of
course, the political expediency of the move is not lost on anyone. With
opinion polls predicting a sweep for Jaganmohan Reddy in Seemandhra and a TRS
surge in Telangana, not to forget Narendra Modi’s impending visit to the state
this month to try and open a BJP account, the timing was just perfect for the
Congress to pull the Telangana rabbit out of the hat.
Thank you KCR offers prayers to goddess Telangana Talli. (Photograph by
Anil Kumar)
KCR
and his party, for one, are stumped. Statehood was their plank, and the
Congress has thrown it out with this ace. Why, it had been banking on the
electorate’s resentment against the Congress’s wavering stance on the issue.
So, while he welcomed the announcement, KCR said he will celebrate only when
the bill is finally passed in Parliament. The party plays coy on any talk of a
merger, and its leaders such as Shravan Kumar and T. Harish Rao continue to bat
for KCR, comparing him to Nelson Mandela and calling him Telangana’s
‘jaati-pitah’. “KCR is the true architect of Telangana,” says Harish Rao.
Jaganmohan
may have lost some ground in Telangana, what with him asking 16 of his MLAs to
resign a couple of days before the CWC meet over the united Andhra issue.
However, political analysts say that having a steadfast stand will help Jagan
win more seats in Seemandhra.
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Telangana
politics also has a caste spinoff. It complicates the scenario for the Reddy
community, who dominated the state’s power elite for ages, by splitting their
bases in Telangana and Rayalaseema. (The attempt to include Anantapur and
Kurnool, both Rayalaseema districts, in Telangana was a bid to prevent this.)
The new Andhra will be left as a battleground for the Kapus and the Kammas
(whom Naidu’s TDP represents). However, the TDP may also pose a problem for the
Congress with the support base it has among the 44 per cent OBCs in the 10
districts of Telangana. Despite voting patterns changing over the years, this
lot has remained with the TDP since the days of N.T. Rama Rao who brought
several of them into leadership posts allowing them to take on forward castes
like the Reddys and Velamas. The OBCs include castes such as Matsyakarulu,
Nayi Brahmins, Rajakulu, Shilpakalu, SC Christian converts, Gouds and Yadavas,
of which the latter two are the most articulate in the statehood movement.
Forced, therefore, into a delicate balancing act, it was a tame Naidu who
addressed the media a day after the Telangana announcement. The Telugus, he
hoped, would remain united even if division was inevitable. He also asked for a
Rs 4-5 lakh crore package to develop a new capital in Andhra and sought
national status for the Pranahita-Chevella irrigation project in Telangana.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/mk7qdsk
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