Introducing Telangana, India's 29th state

Introducing Telangana, India's 29th state

HYDERABAD - At the stroke of midnight, firecrackers went off, sweets were distributed and people waved flags and cheered on the streets of IT city Hyderabad and other nearby cities and towns. They were celebrating the official birth of Telangana, India's 29th state.

Later yesterday, Mr Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao, the chief of local party Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), who led the political struggle for statehood, was sworn in as chief minister, along with 11 ministers.

And the jewel in the crown of the new state - carved out of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh - will be capital city Hyderabad, used as a base by the world's tech giants, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Under the terms of the split, Telangana will share the information technology hub as its capital city with Andhra Pradesh, which has been given 10 years to develop its own capital.

The birth of the new state ends a separation movement that began more than five decades ago that sometimes turned violent as people grew resentful that their aspirations were ignored. In a 1969 unrest, for instance, 300 students were killed by police.

But the decision to allow the split was taken by the former Congress-led government out of hard political calculation to stem its dwindling popularity in Andhra Pradesh more than anything else.

Desperate for backing in the south, Congress had hoped this move would shore up support for it in the Telangana region in the general election last month.

But it was to no avail as voters instead rewarded the TRS and Mr Rao, who in his 13-year political battle for the split, went on many hunger strikes.

The TRS won 11 of the 17 seats in the Telangana region in the general election, while the Congress won only one seat.

Congress was also punished in the rest of Andhra Pradesh, where there was anger over the split, particularly because Hyderabad went to the new state.

The party won just one seat, down from 33 for the whole of the old Andhra Pradesh in the 2009 polls.

Among the first to congratulate the people of the new state was not Congress chief Sonia Gandhi but newly minted Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "India gets a new state! We welcome Telangana as our 29th state. Telangana will add strength to our development journey in the coming years," tweeted Mr Modi.

Telangana faces many challenges - apart from Hyderabad, most parts of the state are underdeveloped and lagging behind in health and education indicators.

"The first challenge is that the Telangana movement has created high aspirations among the people," said Professor K. Nageshwar, a political analyst and an independent member of the new state's legislative council.

Noting that many saw the creation of the new state as a panacea to their problems, he said: "People are now looking for a radically new society."

Telangana also faces a huge security challenge in that many areas affected by Maoist insurgents are within its boundaries.

Still, there is reason to be optimistic, given that India's experience with new states so far has been good.

In 2000, the then Bharatiya Janata Party government created the states of Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, which are seen to be doing better than the states they were once part of.

Dr Bhaskara Rao of the Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies believes the split is good for Telangana. "They have everything going for them. They have coal, forest areas, et cetera."

But he added that a lot depends on how the new government performs and how the new and old states cooperate.


This article was first published on June 3, 2014.
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