Delhi is a political city, but it’s also a government town. While whole theses are written on political actions, few care to 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, are simply not studied and assessed. In public discourse, this creates a gap.
Jairam Ramesh’s Old History, New History: Bifurcating Andhra Pradesh is a 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 useful. For a political buff, this book is fascinating.
The book covers the division of united AP into Telangana and 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. 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 AP 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.
How Telangana would fare “in comparison to the coastal districts” remained an important question. In 1956, as the new Telugu state was formed, 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 Agree-ment”. 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 all the skills of Indira Gandhi to restore calm.
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 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 death of Y. Rajasekhar Reddy in September 2009. K. Chandrasekhar Rao of TRS now smelt his chance and on November 29 began a fast in Hyderabad. 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? Ramesh provides tantalising clues.
Part three of the book is on the mechanics of bifurcation. 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 were reconciled, and how the division set a template for future reorganisation of states is worth a read. 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. As Ramesh writes, in 1919 the Nizam instituted the Mulki Rules, giving preference in government jobs to those domiciled in Telangana.
The domicile rules continued in united AP. In 1959, an Act of Parliament accepted the 15-year residency domicile clause for public employment in Telangana. Following a court battle 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. History had come a full circle. The original Kautilya would have allowed himself a smile.
