During his re-election campaign in 1948, Harry S Truman, America’s thirty-third president, derided the arguments that his opponents in the Republican Party were making which he felt amounted to the old political trick; “if you can’t convince, confuse.” The Srikrishna committee report seems to have taken this a step forward and made it its own: “if you can’t convince, confuse and if you still can’t convince, then conceal.” With the launch of the non-cooperation movement from February 17, it is important to understand why the proponents of a separate Telangana feel betrayed by the report.
The committee while summarising the discussion on socioeconomic indicators has stated verbatim that Telangana might have lower social and economic indices in terms of absolute numbers but when a study of rate of change, growth rate and shares in the state economy are evaluated, nothing unusual emerges. However, the statement doesn’t hold true when the Composite Deprivation Index changes are shown over the last decade. Compiled by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), which has been acknowledged by the committee as a respected think-tank, the composite index aggregates the individual indices of education, health and infrastructure.
Telangana has high levels of deprivation and has recorded a decline of just 2.5 per cent during the reference decade between early to mid-1990 and early to mid-2000. Coastal Andhra, by nature has had relatively low levels of deprivation compared with other regions and it continues to sustain that level with a marginal 0.2 per cent increase. In the last decade the difference between Telangana and Andhra in the deprivation Index is still a whopping 25 per cent. Rayalaseema did have a sharp increase in the deprivation index but even that would have been offset largely with the five years that Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was chief minister when interventions in that region were made proactively.
The other parameter that needs to be looked at is the region-wise change in rural per capita income between 1993-94 and 2004-05 that is stated in the report. Telangana is the only region where large majorities of the people of the region in rural areas have had a decline in incomes. People belonging to the deprived and middle class in Telangana have all had large declines in individual incomes as they are poorer than they were a decade ago. Only the rich in Telangana have had an increase in income as compared to the other regions which have had a general increase in incomes at the bottom of the pyramid.
The report contains a one-page note on the internal security dimensions. Page 423 acknowledges that apart from the immediate law and order problems the long-term internal security implications including the growth of Maoist activities were examined. While the committee had one-to-one discussions on this subject with various officials in the administration the report that has been made public neither acknowledges the information gathered as sensitive, nor does it give a point of view of what the security establishment perceived on the security risks of creating a separate Telangana. While the committee states that the creation of a separate Telangana with or without Hyderabad is likely to experience a spurt in Maoist activity, it does not provide any facts based on which it came to such a conclusion.
While exploring the status quo option the committee states that it did not find any real evidence of any major neglect by the state government in matters of overall economic development. If Telangana is where it is today, it is not because of the policies of the state government but in spite of the policies of the state government. Moreover, the comparison of Telangana to other regions and the portrayal that it has improved at a faster pace vis-à-vis the other regions, rather than comparing the region to its own potential and recording the losses due to untimely or no interventions, seems to have only widened the psychological divide between the regions that would prove detrimental to the long term interests of the state if it were to remain united. In such a case a quick separation by introducing a bill in parliament for a separate Telangana is the only way forward.
By G. Kishan Reddy,
Andhra Pradesh BJP president.
