By Amy Kazmin
Published: April 20 2010 21:28
Martyrs mourned: students at Hyderabad’s Osmania University gather around sketches of colleagues who died by self-immolation in campaigning for a state that would sever the IT city from the coast
A few hours’ drive from the modern software parks, sleek shopping malls and brightly coloured apartment towers of Hyderabad, the Indian information technology hub, the town of Narsampet survives by selling agricultural pumps, fertiliser, seeds, clothes and other essentials to the mostly poor farmers of the surrounding water-scarce villages.
But this little trading post and its environs are in the grip of a growing political fervour – backing demands for New Delhi to grant separate statehood to their parched region, known as Telangana.
Small white flags with the outlines of the proposed state – which would be India’s 29th – hang from shop roofs. In the main square, around 20 women are braving 40C heat without food or water as part of a “relay sit-in” to demand separation from Andhra Pradesh, the state of which Telangana is part. Above the protesters looms a massive poster of the local martyr to the cause, T. Rajkumarchari, a 20-year-old high-school graduate who died two months ago after setting his clothes on fire.
The act of self-immolation came at the end of a pro-Telangana sit-in he attended with family members. His grieving relatives say Rajkumarchari, who twice failed to win appointment as an Andhra Pradesh police constable, believed a new state would help him secure a government job. That is a view shared widely among the region’s frustrated youth, whose aspirations far outpace existing opportunities. “He used to talk continuously about Telangana,” says his grandfather, Sriramoju Bhikshapati, who has also been active in the protests. “There is no water and no opportunity.” The young man’s mother says simply: “He died for Telangana.”
The campaign was pushed to the top of the national agenda last December when K. Chandrashekhar Rao, a pro-Telangana politician, went on a hunger strike demanding the creation of the state. On the 10th day of the fast, with his health deteriorating, New Delhi agreed to start the process, only to back-pedal later by saying it would merely set up a committee to study the issue. Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh and a base for multinationals such as Microsoft and Google, was paralysed for a week by violent protests.
The Telangana passions reflect a broader agitation across India, as citizens question whether the existing political and administrative structure is the most effective means to govern 1.2bn people. The debate is being fuelled by disparities in economic progress and quality of life that, though rooted in history, traditional land ownership patterns and water availability, have widened sharply during the rapid, private sector-led growth of the last two decades.
“This dissatisfaction is mass and genuine,” says Vilas Kale, a businessman who is part of a movement campaigning for the creation of a separate state out of the Vidharba region of Maharashtra, whose state capital is Mumbai. “People here want a solution to their economic backwardness.”
Advocates of redrawing the administrative map argue that many states are too unwieldy to be governed effectively from state capitals. Uttar Pradesh, the largest, has an estimated 180m people – more than twice the population of Germany. Smaller states, supporters say, would facilitate more responsive services such as health, education, agricultural support, policing and poverty alleviation. “Democracy means a constant interaction between the ruler and the ruled,” says Ajit Singh, an MP from Uttar Pradesh. “But in such a large state, it’s just not possible.”
International investors looking towards India normally credit its economic advance to the actions of New Delhi’s suave, highly educated policy-makers. But in India’s federal system, state governments are even more important in creating a hospitable investment climate, responsible for the day-to-day business of developing infrastructure such as power and roads, designating land for industrial development, ensuring law and order, and negotiating with companies on investment incentives.
Smaller states could be a boon to business, as new administrations focus on delivering higher growth to satisfy the aspirations of the local population. But some fret that the statehood movements represent a dangerous step towards the Balkanisation of India. The traumatic 1947 partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan haunts critics of the statehood movements.
For investors, too, looking to tap into India’s vast consumer market, the mobilisation of masses of frustrated youth behind highly emotive campaigns for new states is a worrying prospect. Protracted administrative uncertainty could also deter large-scale investments in restive areas. “The cost of social instability is very high,” says Jahangir Aziz, chief economist in India for JPMorgan. “Why would an Indian or foreign multinational invest in a steel plant in a state that is about to crack up?”
Adding to the concern, several of the statehood movements now gathering momentum are located in mineral-rich areas, where radical Maoist guerrillas known as Naxalites are already active. The rebels have endorsed some of the campaigns, notably that of Telangana – exacerbating the government’s dilemma in considering how to handle the claims.
“Most of the swath of land where all this is happening is [among] the poorest in India, and it is also the swath that has the most mines. If you think of the various problems in Africa, many of them related to similar things.” says Mr Aziz. The areas “were all strip-mined, which left the inhabitants having no possibility of earning a living working on that piece of land”.
Critics say these movements are often led by local elites for their own benefit more than that of the people. “There is an inbuilt self-interest for various politicians to have more states, so they can have more chief ministers,” says Lagadapati Rajagopal, an MP for the ruling Congress party from Andhra Pradesh who opposes the creation of Telangana. “The only way is they can divide the people is on hate. They are trying to divide the fabric of India.”
That fabric is largely made up of states created on linguistic lines after independence – an initiative that is today seen as crucial in having kept India together, defusing potential ethnic strife by ensuring that local governance is carried out in citizens’ mother tongues. “Linguistic states have worked well in cementing India’s unity despite heterogeneity,” says E. Sreedharan, academic director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for Advanced Study of India. “They have made every linguistic group feel they have power where they live. They don’t feel they are being ruled by somebody else.”
Yet many do feel “ruled by somebody else”, blaming economic hardship on state governments’ indifference or hostility to their regions. Lack of access to water, intense competition for government jobs, low levels of public and private investment, and the physical distance to centres of decision-making are all sources of grievance.
“They want to keep us backward, they want to keep us uneducated, they want to keep us dependent on them,” says Raja Bundela, a Bollywood actor campaigning for a state of Bundelkhand, a region that was once a cluster of princely states but is now divided between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. “I want a chief minister who is my man, who understands my geography, my economy.”
For the first decades after independence, when New Delhi was enthralled by socialist-style central planning, states had little economic power as the central government decided which industries could be developed and where. Today, though, states compete for domestic and foreign investment. Gujarat, for example, rushed to secure the Tata Nano project for itself after the plan by the Indian industrial group to build the world’s cheapest car ran into trouble with local farmers at its original site in West Bengal.
“Over time, there has been a fair degree of transfer of economic power to the level of the states,” says Partha Mukhopadhyay at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. “People see value in being able to control the state.”
The map was redrawn in part 10 years ago when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, in power in New Delhi at the time, created the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakand in the Hindi heartland. Yet not everyone is convinced that smaller entities can help solve the problem of rising regional inequities.
N.C. Saxena, former secretary of India’s planning commission and now a United Nations Development Program adviser, says smaller states may have better communication, more oversight of local officials and greater cohesiveness. Yet administrative costs would be higher and their state assemblies could be held hostage by just a few legislators. “A smaller size will certainly facilitate development, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient,” he says.
Rohini Malkani, managing director at Citi Investment Research, warns that if states are divided, “it’s going to bloat the bureaucracy”, adding: “Now you are going to have two of everything.” Others say governance questions would be better handled by a greater decentralisation within existing states, devolving power to rural districts and city administrations.
For now, statehood movements are most prominent in backward regions that their parent states might not feel too aggrieved to lose. Yet talk of statehood is also gathering steam in more prosperous areas. In Uttar Pradesh, politicians from the fertile western belt that borders New Delhi complain of subsidising the rest of a state notorious for its corruption. “People here provide up to 70 per cent of the state revenue and get less than 20 per cent, says Mr Singh, the UP MP, who is demanding the creation of a Harit Pradesh from western UP.
Movements for smaller states are not likely to fade any time soon, especially as disparities widen. India’s administrative map could therefore come to look quite different. Says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, director of the Centre for Policy Research: “There is no reason why a country with four times the population of the US can’t have 50 states.”
FEARS FOR HYDERABAD
At the centre of one battle lie tensions over a tech hub
It is the future of prosperous Hyderabad – an emblem of globalising India smack in the middle of the proposed new state of Telangana – that represents the thorniest immediate issue for policymakers who are being pressed to subdivide some of the country’s most sprawling administrative regions.
“The [Telangana] fight is actually over the cash cow called Hyderabad,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. “The negotiation is going to be very, very difficult.”
Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the capital, was created in 1956 to unite Telugu speakers who during the colonial era were divided between coastal areas under direct British rule and inland regions that had been ruled by the autocratic Nizam of Hyderabad. At unification, the coastal region was more affluent and better educated than the inland Telangana region, disparities that have never been fully overcome.
Over the last decade, much of the investment that has fuelled Hyderabad’s growth has come not from the surrounding area but from the more distant coastal region – which would be jettisoned from the proposed new state. Resentment within Telangana at perceived political and economic domination by the coastal part has fuelled the statehood movement.
Little wonder, then, that Hyderabad’s business elite are deeply concerned about a potential split. Among the most vociferous is Lagatapati Rajagopal, a Congress party MP from the coast whose company, Lanco Infratech, is developing a 100 acre mixed-use township in Hyderabad. Mr Rajagopal has accused pro-Telangana leaders of “spreading hate” and has warned that “India will split into thousands of pieces” if Andhra Pradesh is divided.
What galls him is the movement’s demand to keep a capital that he says has been built by those from across the state. “We have a house. If you want to walk out, you don’t need my permission,” he says from his residence in the city’s desirable Jubilee Hills. But, “if you want to get me out of the house, you need my consent. That’s what is happening here. They are trying to kick away the rest of the state.”
RESHAPE REDUX
At independence from Britain in 1947, India inherited a political map quite different from its current organisation. The country – with its 14 official languages and numerous dialects – comprised a few vast states as well as around 500 princely states, large and small, that during colonial rule had retained their ruling families and governance structures.
In the 1950s, a state reorganisation commission redrew the map, creating states along linguistic lines. Southern, western and eastern India were divided on the principle of one language, one state. North India’s Hindi-speaking belt was divided into multiple states, a process that resumed 10 years ago.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
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