GORKHALAND &TELANGANA

States of Confusion

By Sandip C Jain

Editor, Himalayan Times, Kalimpong

Whether the dramatic green signal shown by the otherwise honourable Union Minister for Home Affairs Mr.P.Chidarambaram to the people of the Telangana region for their demand of re-de-merger, will actually translate into the creation of the twenty-ninth state of the Indian Union or whether it will turn out to be one of the biggest con act pulled out in the Political history of Independent India, still remain a part of the next Act. Only time will tell whether a new state of Telngana will become a reality or whether the midnight assurance given by the Government of India to the Telangana Rastriya Samity was just a ploy to make its supremo K.Chandrashekhara Rao, withdraw his 11 days hunger strikes. Telangana’s fate appears as hazy and shrouded in mystery as the polices of the Central government in matters relating to creation of new states in India.

For the time being of course, all it has managed to do is to set ablaze all the three regions of Andhra Pradesh, (Telangana, Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra Pradesh) which now the Central Government and the Congress Party in particular will find extremely different to extinguish and even if it somehow manages to bring this raging inferno into control, it will only do so at the expense of being severely scalded itself.

But one thing is for sure, the knee-jerk reactions of Central Government in dealing with the latest crisis in Telangana has very surly managed to open that Pandora’s box which both the Central Government as well as several State Government have been trying to keep tightly shut ever since Independence. Ever since Independent India took shape, demands for separate states have periodically erupted across the length & breath of the country. Gorkhaland, Bundelkhand, Harit Pradesh, Mithalanchal, Vidharba, Boroland, Bhojpur, Kodagu, Maru Pradesh and Poorvanchal, to name a few, have time and again, erupted with demand of a separate state. Some of them date back a long long time. Gorkhaland being one such, tracing its origin back to a petition submitted before the Officers of the East India Co; requesting for “Separate of Administrative set-ups’ between Bengal and the Darjeeling Hills. History of Independent India has proved that once born these demands persist despite the Central and State government trying their best to quell these legitimate demands, sometimes through interim measures, as in the case of DGHC and Boroland Councils but mostly through the sheer might of the stick .Then again certain statehood demands like those in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand have been conceded much to the disappointment and anguish of the other aspirants, and also providing a fresh of life to those demands which are overlooked.

The midnight green signal given by Chidambaram to the TRS for the demerger of the Telangana from Andhra Pradesh has done precisely the some, acting like a can of gasoline poured atop a smouldering log. The demand for Gorkhaland is once again now back on certain stage. While the two demands, Telangana & Gorkhaland, might appear on surface to be similar, the fact is that the demand for Telangana was for re-demerger from Andhra Pradesh, the demand in the Darjeeling Hills is only for demerger from Bengal.

The fact is that Telangana was actually a separate state for more than eight years after India gained Independence before being merged with Andhra Pradesh in 1955. The history is that immediately after Independence when the various states were created, there neither was a state called Tamil Nadu nor a state called Andhra Pradesh. In 1953 a Telegu, Potti Sriramula, supporting the demand by the Telegu speaking people in the state of Madras, for the creation of a separate state for themselves, went on a fast on to death. His death sparked off spontaneous protests all over the state, thereby resulting in the creation of Andhra Pradesh with nine coastal district of Madras, north of present day Chennai and four districts of Rayalaseema with its capital in Kurnoor. This in effect meant that two Telegu speaking State come to be in existence in India, one the newly created Andhra Pradesh and the other the State of Hyderabad which was under the Nizams prior to Independence. This state of Hyderabad is roughly the area of todays Telangana. The first S.R.C (1953) or the Fazul Ali Commission, as it was popularly called, also recommended that despite the two states sharing the same languages they should remain as separate states. But Jawaharlal Nehru unmindful of this recommendation as well as of the massive protests in the Telangana region, in 1956, announced the merger of the states of Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh, thereby forming the present day Andhra Pradesh. The present agitation and demand for demerger of Telangana started from that very day on, 1^st Nov 1956, when the state of present day Andhra Pradesh was inaugurated. This announcement by Chidambaram was an effort to correct this 53 years old injustice.

This therefore is the fundamental difference between the demands made in Telangana and the one in the Darjeeling Hills. But there is no denying the fact that the demand for statehood in the Darjeeling Hills is as legitimate and as constitutional as the one in Telangana. Darjeeling Hills was a part of Sikkim and became a portion of Bengal only by default after having several masters. Even after it was attached to the Bengal Province during per-Independence days, the Darjeeling Hills were governed by separate set of rules than those which governed the rest of Bengal .So why does Bengal always respond with just this patent line “Bongallay Bibhajan hobayna” whenever confronted with the question of separation of Darjeeling from it?? “Kano Hobayna”?? They don’t have any answered to this. And the Central Government too seems least bothered, fueling much resentment amongst the lenders & followers of the Gorkhaland Movement.

Several many researches have made findings that given the size and diversity of India it would only be practical for India to be divided into smaller sized states, which as experience has shown, are better government and more manageable than larger states. Sikkim .Delhi, Haryana, Goa and others have proved this already. The Indian Constitution too has empowered the Parliament vide its Article 3(a) to “form a new state by separation of territory from any state or by uniting two or more states or parts of states by uniting any territory to a part of any state”.

Why then or what then is it which makes the creation of new states in India such a big and complex issue?? Actually a weak and indecisive Central Government appears to the main culprit. And to camouflage its weakness, all it does it create further confusions with regards to its policies for granting statehood. With no clear cut polices or guidelines set in place by the Central government and no transparent criterias visible, several many aspirants are compared to believe that the Central Government only understands the language of violence.

Lets hope that the leaders of this hitherto fairly peaceful Movement for Gorkhaland too don’t fall into this trap this time around too.