No one knows who coined the word ‘Seemandhra’ to indicate the non-Telangana regions of Andhra Pradesh. But, the leaders of those two regions certainly would not have anticipated that the ‘Seemandhra’ spectre would loom so large and so quickly upon them as it did on Tuesday.

The people’s demand for a separate Telangana has been long and unceasing for the last 60 years which, after much ebbing and flowing, seems to have found its culmination in the 30 July announcement.

The Congress party swung back and forth in the last three and a half years since it first announced the initiation of the process of state formation in December 2009, but finally fell to political expediency.

“It is not a political decision,” said Digvijaya Singh, in charge of AP Congress affairs, while announcing the outcome of the UPA and CWC meetings which unanimously resolved to form Telangana.  A laughable claim since the timing of the announcement is unmistakable, and the haste with which the issue has been handled is clearly not without an electoral design.

It is clear that the Congress wants to win at least half of the 33 seats it had won in the 2009 polls in the State, an objective that gained strength from the recent, not-so-bad show put up by the party candidates in the first two phases of the panchayat elections.

Also noteworthy is the political strategizing that the party started a few weeks back by granting Cabinet berths in the latest reshuffle to two of the most hardcore united Andhra leaders, Kavuri Sambasiva Rao from West Godavari and JD Seelam from Guntur and then making them responsible for reigning in the ferocious local leaders in their respective areas.

It is also hard to discount the other push factor – the BJP. Considering that the BJP president made repeated statements that the NDA will form Telangana if it comes to power and that Narendra Modi, who will visit Andhra Pradesh next month, is likely to make a definitive statement, the Congress leadership appears to have been compelled to take a definitive decision.

Congress actions to prod the TRS about its merger promise even as it stole K Chandrasekhar Rao’s thunder with the sudden announcement, and the underlying need to neutralize Jagan Reddy and a hassling Chandrababu Naidu in the run-up to the 2014 polls, also show that the decision is nothing but political.

The response to the announcement is guarded and skeptical, including from the Telangana quarters themselves. Mutual mistrust continues, with both the TRS as well as the coordinator of the Telangana Joint Action Committee (JAC) calling for caution until the Bill is passed. “Some people may have burst a few crackers but the official celebrations will be only after the Bill is passed,” said Rao.

The CWC’s decision was not be easy, said Digvijaya Singh. What lies ahead for the party and the Government is no picnic either. Many issues are sticky and promise to make the path to statehood a walk on burning coals.

The biggest and the foremost issue is Hyderabad.

Hyderabad will remain the common capital for 10 years, a move that indulges the Telangana camp, a fact acknowledged by KCR who has already started calling for investments in the city for ‘more jobs for Telangana youth’.

However, common claims notwithstanding, the geo-location of Hyderabad, which entails travelling through Telangana districts, is bound to be irksome for people from other regions. The Hyderabad-based Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), which has been opposing bifurcation and has been leaning toward Rayala-Telangana which can bring in more Muslim votes, is expected to make strategic moves to assert itself too.

What is equally worrying for the Congress is the spate of resignations from its ranks, which already began with senior MP Rayapati Sambasiva Rao and the chairman of its 20 point programme committee Tulsi Reddy leading the way. Then the maverick Vijaywada MP Lagadapati Rajgopal, understandably wearing a dark scowl, threatened ominously that ‘it is not all over.’

He inadvertently confirmed the suspicions of the Telangana people that there may be many a slip between the cup and the lip, and there was danger of a repeat of the 2009 Chidambaram episode.

The funniest part though was the scramble to take credit for the new state. While the TRS chief thanked everyone from the poets to paperboys for making his dream come true, the Congress leaders struck a sagacious and benevolent pose, basking in their latest surge of power. The BJP claimed that its back-end operations did the magic.

Curiously enough, although it has been the only party that has always stuck to the two-states formula, the response that the BJP got from the Telangana people in the recent Panchayat elections was inhospitable to put it mildly. The TDP is mostly stunned into silence, an echo of its position in 2009, though some of its Telangana leaders claim some slice of the glory.

The YSR Congress party is merely muttering in protest for now and is more concerned with the dissent brewing in its own backyard.

Reports are pouring in from the Rayalaseema and coastal districts of angry protests and violence, but whether the anger is organically sustainable is the question. And the red corridor theory that has been floated by a section of the police officers in the state seems to have been brushed aside by the Government.

The drama will unfold for real in the monsoon session of Parliament, but the Group of Ministers that will be set up on the issue may have some bearing on it. And then, there is the demand for a separate Rayalaseema that is slowly fuming with a senior IPS officer resigning. Incidentally, Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy, Chandrababu Naidu and YS Jaganmohan Reddy are all from the Seema region.

The campaign for the 2014 elections is going to be by far the most interesting this State has ever seen. The leaders from the Seemandhra region, who had become rather complacent in the recent months, are now set to raise a fresh battle cry, but it remains to be seen whether the preventive strategies that the Congress may have planned will subdue them.

Since there is still no clarity as to who should look for their political stakes in which part, it will be strategic politics that will take precedence over long-term development goals. Meanwhile, people in the three regions of the present Andhra Pradesh will continue to be at a loss.

source:http://www.firstpost.com