Asian Window

India’s latest statehood movement reveals a crisis at the heart of the country’s globalising ambitions. Siddhartha Deb on the fight for Telangana. From The National:

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2008, I found myself standing in a concrete building set amid a patchwork of agricultural fields on the outskirts of Armoor, a town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The building had a grand title, Garden City Function Hall, but apart from its bleak rural surroundings – the vegetation blasted dull yellow by months without rain – there was little to distinguish it from countless such structures in India that are regularly rented out for weddings and celebrations. As waiters dressed in jeans, vests and shoes without socks circulated with glasses of water, a man with long hair and a thick moustache began singing, his right hand sometimes pressed to his heart and sometimes swept out in the hope of stirring people from their midday torpor. A chorus line of young boys, bare-chested and in white dhotis, danced behind the singer, occasionally breaking out in a sheepish refrain of “Jai Telangana!” – “Victory to Telangana”.

The singers were demanding the formation of a new state called Telangana, an area of some 155,400 square km to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth-largest state. The hundred-odd people at the gathering, from farmers with calloused hands to lawyers with video cameras, were there to support this demand, as was R Limbadri, a professor at Osmania University in Hyderabad, who had grown up in a nearby village and had brought me to the event. Limbadri was a Dalit, a member of the lowest Hindu caste, and he was far less dramatic than the singer when he addressed the crowd. He supported statehood, he said, but only if Telangana was formed as a different kind of state, one truly committed to ending the incredible economic disparity that has troubled Andhra Pradesh in recent years. More:

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