A split story: Close look at how govt really works

Delhi is a political city, but it’s also a government town. While several theses have been written on political motivations and actions, few care to determinedly and doggedly understand how government works. The reference here is not to the BJP government or Congress government. The point is the inner workings of the government system, the impulses and instinctive responses of a bureaucratic and rules-based culture that may be exasperating but is still the only one we have, are simply not studied and assessed with the care and rigour they deserve. In public discourse, this creates a gap.

Jairam Ramesh’s Old History, New History: Bifurcating Andhra Pradesh is a slim but valuable book that seeks to fill this gap. It’s not the last word on the subject, as even the author agrees. Yet any future chronicler will find Ramesh’s book extremely purposeful in beginning his or her research. For a political buff, this book is fascinating.

The book covers the division of united Andhra Pradesh into Telangana and the successor state of Andhra Pradesh. This process started with an announcement in New Delhi in December 2009 and ended with the birth of the two new states in the summer of 2014, soon after the Lok Sabha election and Assembly polls in the two proto-states. In a sense, the book can be seen as a compendium of three narratives. The first is the history of the Telangana movement, the urge in Telugu-speaking regions of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s kingdom for an independent voice and later for a unification with Telugu-speaking segments of the old Madras state. This created Vishal Andhra or Andhra Pradesh as India’s first linguistic state in 1956.

Having said that, the merger was never smooth. Social and economic conditions in coastal Andhra, which had benefited from irrigation projects going back to the times of legendary 19th century engineer Sir Arthur Cotton, were very different from Telangana. So the grievance never quite went away.

How Telangana would fare “in comparison to the coastal districts” remained an important question. In 1956, as the new and united Telugu state was formed, Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Ballabh Pant, then home minister, “got eight leaders from both Andhra and Hyderabad states to meet in Delhi and arrive at a written understanding regarding ... what special safeguards would be put in place for the people of Telangana. The understanding that these eight leaders finalised is known as the Gentleman’s Agreement”.

This agreement was often threatened. In late 1960s, the Telangana issue was exacerbated by Congress factionalism, following the marginalisation of M. Chenna Reddy, a Telangana stalwart, in state politics. It took the firefighting skills of Indira Gandhi to restore calm. Nevertheless the issue was simmering. In this first part of the book it is not politician Jairam Ramesh who writes but columnist Kautilya. The rigour and clarity is reminiscent of the author’s remarkably educative column by that name in India Today in the late 1990s.

The second part of the book is the shortest. It begins with the sudden passing of Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy, the Andhra strongman, in September 2009. K. Chandrasekhar Rao of Telangana Rashtra Samithi now smelt his chance and on November 29 began a fast in Hyderabad. Agitators thronged the streets and the situation grew tense. Rao was looking for an exit route and didn’t quite expect a state, or so Ramesh hints.

On December 9, P. Chidambaram, Union home minister, made a statement accepting the creation of Telangana in principle. Was it a panic reaction Did he have (overstated) reports of Rao’s health and of Maoist infiltration of the crowds in Hyderabad Did he lose his nerve Ramesh is careful not to dissect his colleague’s motivations but provides tantalising clues. The countdown to Telangana had begun.

Part three of the book is on the mechanics of bifurcation (or “demerger”, as Ramesh says). Ramesh was instrumental here because from October 2013 to May 2014 he was the driving force of the GoM tasked with this. In particular, his detailed explanation of how water and power sources were shared, how natural boundaries and boundaries related to economic projects were reconciled, and how the division, acting without precedents in many cases, set a template for future reorganisation of giant states is worth a read for any student of contemporary history.

The continuum of government is well brought, including in the BJP-led government’s embracing of much of the GoM report that Ramesh had written. This continuum emerges in other ways as well. As Ramesh writes, in 1919 the Nizam instituted the “Mulki Rules”, giving preference in government jobs to those domiciled in a region such as Telangana (or Aurangabad, now in Maharashtra).

The domicile rules continued in united Andhra Pradesh. In 1959, an Act of Parliament accepted the 15-year residency domicile clause for public employment in Telangana. Following a court battle and political unrest, this was enshrined in the Constitution by the 32nd Amendment Act of 1973 as Article 371-D. In 2014, the “Mulki Rules” were invoked again: this time to ensure justice for long-term residents of Telangana whose families had migrated from Coastal Andhra or Rayalseema. Now they needed protection in Telangana.

History had come a full circle. The original Kautilya would have allowed himself a smile.

The writer is senior fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com