the s$#t in our minds

can't get this horrifying story out of my mind. can anyone suggest any ways of contacting those protesters? comment here or write to any insight member.

the business of telangana

kancha ilaiah offers some advice to 'hyderabad capitalists':

“We will not allow your business in Hyderabad”, they say. “We will not allow your cinema industry to run; we will not allow even your cricket match to take place”.

You have pacified them by bribing them. Of course, you have also aided and abetted a united Andhra movement alongside.

What worries me most is the way the leaders growing around such movements have become richer day by day.

Thanks to this, your economic activity has been going on without hurdles. After each such threat, it is the threat giver’s wealth and health that is increasing. But the general health of Telangana — the economic health of its aam aadmi — has been deteriorating.

In the late 60s and early 70s the Telangana movement was conducted mostly on legs and bicycles. The bigger leaders of the movement were moving in jeeps, and even the biggest ones could only boast Ambassador cars.

Yet they conducted agitations that shook the Centre, inspired the youth to brave bullets and also won elections — 11 out of 14 parliamentary seats were in the pocket of Praja Samithi.

Of course, that movement also caused loss of lives and disrupted education. Lot of public property that Telangana people would have used for their advancement was damaged. The agitations also pushed the region backwards in the field of education. And no great moral leader or intellectual emerged from the movement. And most importantly, Telangana did not become a separate state.

But the fact remains that no leader made money out of that movement. Only Mr Chenna Reddy made political capital.

Now look at the present Telangana movement and its drivers. All you see is money, money and more money. Where is it coming from? Obviously much of it is coming from you. You see this movement as an inevitable evil and want to handle it as carefully as possible.

There is a saying that Capitalists like corrupt Communists. Not only can the corrupt Communist be bribed, his presence also gives a bigger moral licence to the capitalist to exploit workers more and more.

apart from politicians, too many other people from other classes seem to have developed an increasing interest in the telangana industry over the last several years. out of work film actors. directors. hardly working government babus and teachers. lawyers looking for prosecutors', magistrates' posts. thousands of aspiring legislators and corporators. you name them. if the road to telangana itself holds such huge business potential, think about the hold of the destination for them.

look at kcr himself. in the beginning, it was only kcr. and then a couple of his nephews joined the 'agitation'. one of them became an mla twice. somewhere along the way, he managed to lose his hawai chappals and managed to buy himself more trendy footwear and much else. and then kcr's son left his job in the information technology industry in the u.s., and decided the telangana business was much more lucrative. he was soon followed by his sister and brother-in-law. and numerous cousins and other relatives are also hanging around..what does all that illustrate?

and then there are more smart people waiting in the wings, like lots of successful telanganis working abroad. like a few in the telangana development forum for instance. it's difficult to say how many of them will be chosen as candidates by mainstream political parties in the next elections for the andhra pradesh or telangana assembly (it doesn't matter which, really) but many of them are saving money to buy tickets, i'm sure.

the normalisation of abuse

Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) leader and MP Vijayashanti was released from jail on bail Saturday evening, a few hours after she was arrested for making inflammatory remarks ahead of the July 27 by-elections in Telangana and sent to judicial custody.

A city court granted bail to the actress-turned-politician, who alleged that police misbehaved with her and said she had decided to take up the issue with the prime minister and Lok Sabha speaker.

After her release from Chanchalguda jail this evening, she told reporters that the way a woman MP was treated by the police was shameful. 'My only crime is that I gave a slogan,' she said referring to the allegedly provocative remark she made a few days ago. [emphasis mine].

and what were the inflammatory remarks (or slogan, as the actress mp says) the news report talks about? 'aDDangaa narikEddAm' (or loosely: cut them, as with a sword, in half). that was her reminder to some women who had recently joined the party. cut who in half? those who oppose a separate telangana state, of course.

'telangANa ku aDDostE aDDangaa narikEddAm' ('we'll cut those who oppose telangana in half')- that was the slogan she was referring to. a slogan so popular now that everyone, from separatist politicians to school kids, chant it quite casually, whenever they're lost for words, almost.

until the election commission took note of it a couple of days ago. did it violate the 'model code of conduct' now in operation due to the by-elections in constituencies vacated by the trs mlas in protest against the delay in the formation of a separate telangana?

HYDERABAD: Chief electoral officer I V Subba Rao said on Saturday that the Election Commission has nothing to do with the arrests of TRS Medak MP Vijayashanti and Sangareddy Congress MLA T Jayaprakash Reddy. Six nominations were filed on the second day of the notification.

The CEO said that the commission took cognizance of the statements of Vijayashanti and Jayaprakash Reddy and informed it to the ECI. The EC has not directed the police to arrest the leaders. There are certain provisions in the law for the police to arrest and they have acted according to that, said Rao. The EC issued notices to Jayaprakash Reddy on Saturday and asked him to reply by July 5.

what do you understand from that news story? forget the 'model' code of conduct imposed by the election commission, the slogan violated the 'normal' code of public conduct expected of ordinary citizens! which means, all those thousands, lakhs, of slogan chanters all through the last ten years could have been charged with the relevant provisions of indian laws!

and such obnoxious slogans and other forms of vituperation etc have been 'normal' currency in all the 'democratic' discourse of the separatists over the last several years. how normal? check the broad smile on the the actor-mp's face (in the videos you'd definitely find somewhere on the net) when she was repeating the slogan during the event which caught the ec's attention.

back to the stone age

back. my apologies to everyone who's commented and looked around here. have been a little tied up and could only focus on the shared mirror, a site that shall feature the creative work of both established and new dalitbahujan writers. please take a look.

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a couple of events that caught my eye in the recent past:

* an honour killing. reportedly the first in the south..but where are the separatists? why don't you hear someone shout in pride: jai telangana? more banda* culture than sabbanda culture.

* and some more sabbanda culture was also displayed at mahbubabad where y.s. jaganmohan reddy, y.s. rajasekhar reddy's son, was supposed to visit families of people who'd died of 'shock' etc when ysr died. democracy, in the separatist stone throwers' view, would get vitiated if anyone exercised their freedom of speech against the 'people's view', even indirectly, that a separate state is a holy cause. and jaganmohan reddy, as heir to ysr's fiefdom, apparently believes feudalistic loyalties are the lifeblood of democracy.

talking of feudalistic loyalties: a commenter/s ( i think it's a single individual) has been stalking my earlier posts with some strange comments. one says, something like: kodandaram reddy, leader of the telangana 'joint action committee' had legally dropped the caste-suffix 'reddy' from his name after the karamchedu incident.. my question is: should we be grateful to him for doing that?

a dalit when he adds the name of his caste to his given name, like manda krishna 'madiga', is trying to tell you he is proud of his lineage.. proud of all the heredity of honest sweat and pure toil the name signifies. on the other hand, i've always looked at the flaunting of upper caste surnames as a kind of an assault on the rest of humanity. an open declaration of faith in a racialist ideology. reddies and kammas and rajputs and brahmins etc would do themselves a favour by dropping those crutches and learnt to live without them, in my view. i believe it isn't nice to call yourself rajput. or reddy. or whatever.

like i said earlier, the telangana movement doesn't have any social content. it uses all the emancipatory jargon, airs all the right theories of exploitation, but.. the primary instincts of the separatists are very status-quoist. and their respect for debate and therefore democracy sometimes descends to the level of discourse in the stone age.

* banDa: telugu for rock/stone.