It’s a fresh start for Telangana and Seemandhra

N Chandrababu Naidu

The creation Telangana brings to end a tumultuous chapter in Indian politics. If the previous BJP-led NDA government had shown how to efficiently go about with carving out not one but three states, the Congress-led UPA 2 government mishandled the creation of Telangana right from 2009 when it made the announcement about starting the process of creating a separate state. The Congress failed to gauge the mood of the people and take them into confidence. After dithering over the decision for four years, the UPA government in the last lap of its term decided to accelerate the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. But so miscalculated was its approach that even its chief minister, N Kiran Kumar Reddy, opposed the move. Such was the resentment of the people of the state that in this general election, of the total 42 seats in undivided Andhra Pradesh, the Congress managed to get only two. It is expected that the BJP-led NDA government, now in power, will handle the situation better and till now have made the right moves.

K Chandrashekar Rao

While the Telugu Desam Party, under the leadership of N Chandrababu Naidu, has won 102 of the 175 assembly seats in Seemandhra, K Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti has won 63 of the 119 assembly seats in Telangana. The majority gives both the leaders a free hand to lead stable governments, which is important for the new states. Mr Naidu — who in his previous tenure as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh ushered in considerable development and turned the state into one of the IT hubs in India — appears to be the right person to head Seemandhra at this point of time. Mr Rao is a seasoned politician who has spoken up for the people of Telangana and has got the people’s mandate.
The challenge for the Centre will be to address the needs of both the states in a fair manner. Sectors like power, education, industry, irrigation need to be prioritised and resources need to be divided equitably. Every decision taken will have a lasting impact on the states and there’s no room for error. Both Mr Naidu and Mr Rao get off to a fresh start and their vision will go a long way towards setting the course in which each state will move in the coming decades. For the two leaders to deliver it is important that the Centre assist them at all steps. And given the equations at the moment, this should not prove too difficult.

Telangana: Congress disagrees with Kiran Kumar Reddy's script for Andhra Pradesh

N Kiran Kumar Reddy

‘The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ — this phrase best  describes the present crisis the Congress is facing in Andhra Pradesh. The Congress-led UPA at the Centre wants the creation of India’s 29th state Telangana, by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh, but the leaders in Hyderabad are literally in two minds. While chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy is opposing the move, his deputy, Damodar Raja Narasimha, is for a separate Telangana state. In a move that highlights this divide and which puts a question mark over the Centre’s plan to introduce a Bill for a separate Telangana in Parliament, Reddy on Saturday issued a notice to Speaker Nadendla Manohar seeking a motion for returning the draft Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill to the Centre. Mr Reddy rejected the Bill stating that it did not give a ‘reason/basis’ for the bifurcation of the state. On Monday, the divide came out in the open with repeated adjournments of the assembly and with Mr Narasimha even demanding Mr Reddy’s resignation.
At the heart of the debate are the sentiments of the people on the Telangana and Seemandhra sides — both sides feel that they have been given short shrift. While one side of the divide blames the government for delaying the creation of the Telangana state, the other side criticises the ‘unjust’ division of the state and its resources. The state government, and the Centre, should have seen this coming. They should have taken the people from both sides of the divide into confidence, listened to their grievances and arrived at a formula that was acceptable to all parties. It was not for want of time that the party finds itself in the present mess — the call for a separate Telangana has been on for decades and it has been more than three years since Justice BN Srikrishna handed over his committee’s recommendations on the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.
No matter how things pan out in Andhra Pradesh, one thing is clear: the Congress has failed to read the mood of the people. It has for far too long been unclear on its commitment to the creation of Telangana. This suggests bad political management and will have an impact not only the on the state elections but also on the Lok Sabha elections, both to be held in a  few months. If opinion polls are anything to go by, the Congress, which had won 33 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from the state in 2009, will find it very hard to even get half of that tally. For a Congress that has been on the backfoot after the drubbing it received at the recent assembly elections held in four states, this is not good news.