Congress Party Supports Creation of Telangana State

Saurabh Das/Associated Press A protester braving a police water cannon during a demonstration in New Delhi on Sept. 4, 2012, seeking a separate state of Telangana.

After years of hunger strikes, sit-ins, and even suicides by activists, India’s ruling Congress party has endorsed the creation of Telangana as the 29th state of India by dividing the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The Congress Working Committee, the highest body of India’s governing party, passed a resolution Tuesday evening after its allies in the United Progressive Alliance coalition backed the formation of the new state.

“Hyderabad will be the common capital for 10 years,” said Digvijaya Singh, a senior Congress Party leader, who was party of the crucial meeting, told the press in New Delhi. He described an elaborate procedure that has to be followed before the new state can come into existence. After consultations at the state level, the Indian Parliament has to pass a bill for the creation of the state with a simple majority vote.

Telangana would be carved out of 10 northwestern districts of Andhra Pradesh and would comprise an area of around 60,000 square miles. A separate state of Seemandhra, which would encompass the eastern coastal and southern districts of Andhra Pradesh, would also simultaneously come into being.

“We have been optimistic and hopeful that the Congress Party will keep its promise to grant statehood for Telangana,” said K.T. Rama Rao, a top leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi party and a lawmaker in the Andhra Pradesh state assembly.

“An announcement was made on Dec. 9, 2009, but it was later retracted. While we welcome today’s announcement, we would remain guarded till the bill for a separate statehood for Telangana is passed by the Indian Parliament,” Mr. Rao added.

Andhra Pradesh was the first Indian state to be created in 1956 on the basis of a common language, setting a precedent for the reorganization of Indian states on a linguistic basis. Andhra Pradesh, a Telugu-speaking state, was created by combining three regions of Telangana, Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema.

The regions of Coastal Andhra and Rayalseema were relatively better developed and had higher literacy rates. But the Telangana region was predominantly poor, highly feudal and lacking in all socioeconomic indicators. Most of the politicians representing the state of Andhra Pradesh came from Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra regions, also known as the “Seema-Andhra” region.

The embers of discontent in Telangana began to glow in the late 1960s. Marri Channa Reddy, a Congress Party politician who came from Telangana, parted ways with the Congress in 1969. Mr. Reddy formed a separate party, the Telangana Praja Samithi (Telangana People’s Congress) to speak for the subregional aspirations of his people.

Mr. Reddy’s mobilization for Telangana found immense support from students at Osmania University in Hyderabad, the state’s capital. Throughout 1969, Osmania students, supported by farmers and landless laborers from across the region, led a violent agitation in favor of a separate state of Telangana. The proponents of a separate Telangana state argued that their region had been systematically discriminated against and neglected when it came to economic development and political representation in Andhra Pradesh.

Manish Swarup/Associated Press Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, left, and Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee in New Delhi on Tuesday to decide on the statehood demand of Telangana.

The stalemate was resolved after 18 volatile months, when the Andhra Pradesh government promised greater inclusion to the people from Telangana region. Mr. Reddy merged his party into the Congress Party. The movement for a Telangana state was stalled for the next 30 years.

“The rise of popular leaders like the legendary N.T. Rama Rao, who founded the Telugu Desam Party, his successor and son-in-law N. Chandrababu Naidu, and Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy of the Congress, who united people across the state on different agendas, meant that the Telangana agitation was dormant,” said Mahesh. Vijaypurkar, an analyst based in Hyderabad.

In 1995, Nara Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party became the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Between 1995 and 2004, Mr. Naidu aggressively pushed economic reforms and encouraged investment from information technology companies in Hyderabad, including Microsoft, which opened its first port of operation outside the United States in the state capital. Mr. Naidu’s policies brought thousands of high-paying jobs for I.T. professionals to the city. Hyderabad’s skyline transformed within years â€" thousands of apartment blocks and luxurious mansions serviced by glitzy shopping malls, pubs and high-end fashion outlets bloomed across the city.

The economic rise of Mr. Naidu’s Hyderabad trickled down to the Telangana through the modest wages of its migrant workers, who had left their farms and joined a growing workforce of construction workers, waiters and delivery boys in “Cyberabad,” as Mr. Naidu liked to call the capital.

Several thousand debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in the Telangana in the past decade, and tens of thousands of landless villagers have migrated from the region to Hyderabad. In 2001, 3.6 million people lived in Hyderabad. The number rose to 6.8 million in 2010, and has grown further to over 9.1 million in 2013. Although an exact breakdown of this growing population is not available, the rise in population gives a sense of the pull the city exerts for the opportunity-starved residents of the poorer districts.

In Hyderabad, the migrant workers and students from Telangana were exposed to the growing inequality around them, which ignited the old resentments of neglect and discrimination. Chinna, a 17-year-old Dalit worker in Hyderabad, delivers grocery bags to apartments in the elite Hi-tech City neighborhood, which houses Google, Amazon, Facebook, I.B.M., Dell and Microsoft, among other multinational giants. Mr. Chinna, who uses only one name, migrated to Hyderabad from the Mahbubnagar district after his family couldn’t survive on agricultural labor.

Reflecting upon his family’s history of continual misery, he reveals that as Dalits, or the former untouchable caste, they never owned land. “The land was always owned by the upper caste landlords. We always worked, sometimes out of bondage to repay old debts of forefathers, and mostly because it was the only way to avoid death by hunger,” said Mr. Chinna.

“I have been here for seven years. I have washed dishes at tea stalls, driven an auto-rickshaw, worked as a cleaner in a private bus,” he said.

As a delivery boy, Mr. Chinna earns 2,350 rupees ($40) a month; gifts and tips add up to another 600 rupees ($10). “I have to sustain myself and send money to family,” he said.

Mr. Chinna said he believed that another world is possible after the creation of Telangana. “Many people say nothing will change for me or my family even when Telangana is formed. I hope to get better work, earn more money. But if nothing else happens, we will have pride. We have struggled and won. We have our own state,” he said.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times K. Chandrasekhar Rao, leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti political party went on an indefinite fast in 2009 seeking a separate state of Telangana.

The political aspirations of Telangana’s poor got a renewed impetus since 2001 after K. Chandrasekhar Rao, an upper-caste leader from the Telugu Desam Party, quit and formed the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, a political party dedicated to renewing the struggle for a separate state.

Almost 600 students, mostly Dalits, have committed suicide over the last 10 years to emphasize the need for a separate Telangana, like a student who killed himself last month. Opponents call most of these suicide claims “falsified,” trumped up by the political leaders and media, which they say “converts” normal suicides into “political” ones. Pro-Telangana activists celebrate them as martyrs and claim their numbers are over 3,000.

“The region, especially its most backward castes - the Dalits and Tribals - have suffered for centuries,” said Biju Mathew, a Hyderabad-born scholar, who teaches at Ryder University College in New York. “A separate Telangana is an aspiration of hope for the extremely downtrodden.”

Mr. Rao and his Telangana Rashtra Samiti party joined hands with Congress in the 2004 elections on the promise of delivering a Telangana state. The Congress-Telangana Rashtra Samithi coalition won, but they failed to deliver their promise. Mr. Rao continued to press his demand of a separate state and the Congress Party of betraying his region.

In Nov. 29, 2009, Mr. Rao commenced a fast until death to pressure Congress to concede to the creation of a Telangana state. His hunger strike found immense support. Ten days later, the central government in New Delhi, led by the Congress Party, announced that it would be initiating the process of forming the new state, including passing a bill in Parliament.

It triggered a counterprotest from lawmakers from Andhra Pradesh’s Seema-Andhra regions, who threatened to resign. The Congress government retracted its bill.

The opponents of the division of Andhra Pradesh have been arguing that Telangana has witnessed more development than other two regions, and the capital city, Hyderabad has been developed by people of all regions. A division would deprive them of Hyderabad, they contended.

“We cannot divide and create new states based on sentiments and flared-up passions,” said Lagadapati Rajgopal, a Congress member of Parliament. “By relenting to the political Telangana agitation, we are allowing India to get divided and weaken our federal structure.”

India’s government had appointed a commission headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice B.N. Sri Krishna, to study the viability of Telangana as a separate state in 2010. “The Sri Krishna Committee has said that if Telangana is formed, the region will become a breeding ground for extreme left-wing Maoist violence and also lead to politics of communal passions and strife,” Mr. Rajgopal added.

Another major opponent to the creation of Telangana is Asadudin Owaisi, who heads the Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and is a member of the Parliament from Hyderabad. “The Bharatiya Janata Party will be the biggest winner of this divide. The Muslims will suffer and so will the values of secularism,” said Mr. Owaisi.

The Congress Party’s decision to support the creation of Telangana is based on cynical electoral calculations. Andhra Pradesh has had a Congress government for the past nine years. “The Congress government has become highly unpopular,” said Mr. Vijaypurkar, the Hyderabad analyst. The opposition parties in the states, especially the Telugu Desam Party and a splinter group of the Congress party, YSR-Congress, are becoming stronger.

“This divide-and-rule will give the Congress some seats in the coming elections at least in one region,” added Mr. Vijaypurkar.

Sriram Karri is a Hyderabad-based journalist.