Finally, on June 2, Telangana,
the 29th state of the Indian Union, came into existence. For the
Telangana people, the achievement to have their own home state came after decades
of struggle and they deserved the celebrations that begun as the clock hit the
midnight point on the night of June 1-June 2.
Sharing the wealth of the
Information Technology hub of Hyderabad with the parent Andhra Pradesh (or for
that matter Seemandhra, if the state is renamed), the new state can start
building and rebuilding on what is available (with the expected help from the
Centre, what a state’s reorganization deserves), to undo what they have been
claiming – the injustice done to the Telangana people by their Andhra
counterparts.
After 2000, when India got three
new states in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand), it is
now the turn of Telangana and the obvious parallels will be drawn, on social and
economic growth indicators.
And we don’t need to do data
crunching to come to the conclusion that it has been a mixed result.
Chhattisgarh has performed well
as it could get a good administrator in the chief minister Raman Singh. How
questionable is the Uttarakhand experiment the Himalayan floods of June 2013 tell
us. Take a drive from Dehradun to Haridwar and you won’t find even a single
street-light on the highway outside the city limits. This is when the state is
claimed to be a power surplus state. And we can say the Jharkhand experiment
has failed to score any significant positive talking point so far. Political
instability and questionable leadership in Uttarakhand and Jharkhand are to
share the blame.
And the Telangana birth would be
assessed on the scale of development and change with the ‘so far’ outcome of
these three states.
And as we saw in the case of
Chhattisgarh and other two states, lot depends on the political dispensation and
the person at the top of it.
And though we need to wait to
comment on how the first Telangana government is going to be on the performance
scale, unfortunately, it has begun on a wrong note.
With Telangana, yet another
political dynasty has taken birth in India .
KCR (or K Chandrashekar Rao), the
first CM of the state, who claims the Telangana fight as his own with his
political outfit TRS (Telangana Rashtra Samithi) has made his son and nephew
ministers in the first Telangana cabinet. Only his daughter is left out and we
should not be surprised if she is taken in the Cabinet expansion when it
happens.
We can say it a royal coronation
indeed - millions fought for decades, many lost lives - to crown a family - to
come to this – to handover the reins of the state to a family and not to a
person - the curse of India's electoral democracy continues.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
