Tankbund statues

Statues Vs Lives

Those of us who went to participate in the Million March on the Tank Bund were dismayed when a few young men started to break the statues of 'Great Telugu poets' on Tank Bund. Many of us tried to stop the men without success. The young men were few in number but the large crowd simply looked on, sometimes cheering, but mostly acquising. The ones who tried to stop them were also few in number - mostly the 'progressive' group. We were outnumbered and outmatched by the young men's ferocious responses. 

Till then, the March was going on peacefully, with groups of people arriving with thier respective banners. I met friends and supporters of Telangna from different fields and we all greeted each other with enthusiasm. There were feeble murmurs about this being 'our Cairo' march. Those of us who lost contact in that crowd identified our respective locations by the names of statues - Molla, Yerrapragada, Tikkana. They were positioned there as the symbols of Telugu culture by erstwhile CM, late NT Rama Rao, the great champion of Telugu self-resepct. They have been subject of some humour and some anger, but reluctantly one has come to accept them as part of the landscape. We also joked that the statues seem to be of some use! 

I spotted Telangana Praja Samithi, Telangana Railway Employees Association, Telangana RTC Employees Association, Telangana Lawyers' Association, Doctors Association, Movement for Peace and Justice, Telangana Teachers Association, various units of the Telangna Joint Action Committee apart from the predominant presence of BJP and ABVP. They were marching from one end to the other. Smaller groups like Singidi, Chaitanya Mahila Samakhya, Mahila JAC, Hyderabad Forum for Telangana made their presence felt by gathering around a statue and giving slogans.

Most of the slogans were pretty commonplace: Give us our Telangana; We will take our Telangana; Nobody can stop us from taking Talangana. The small groups gathered around the statues were specific in their slogans: We want our water, we want our rivers, give us our Telangna; we want our Telangana culture, we don't want the imperialism of Andhra culture; we will take our Telangana for the sake of all the martyrs. 

Nearly 600 people have committed suicide leaving notes that they want Telangana state to be declared. The sucidies notes were specifically related to the events that they saw as preventing the formation of a state: Central government going back on 9th December statement; the resignations of all the Seemandhra MLAs and MPs; Telangana MLAs and MPs from Congress and TDP going back on the promise of resignations; particular statements of political leaders; obstacles to different protest marches and agitations. 

Some of us reached the venue despite numerous traffic diversions, scaling the Tank Bund from smaller bylanes. But most others had come through long and tortuous journey. Police had started detaining activists in ten Telananga districts from 5th March. Numbers of such detained people ('bound over') range from 25,000 to 1,00,000, according to different reports. More people were detained today. MLAs different political parties tried to march to the Tank Bund from the Assembly and were detained. We heard people saying that it took a whole day to reach Hyderabad from Nizamabad, a neighbouring district. Due to traffic diversions, it took more than two hours for people to reach from the bus stations or railway stations to reach the venue. 

The March was put under heavy surveillance purportedly to conduct the Intermediate exams that have been going on from 1st March. The Telangana Joint Action Committee, a conglomoration of different employees associations, political parties and other groups had given the call for this march. Reportedly Telangana Rastra Samiti wanted the march to be postponed but the groups everywhere had already got ready for the march. They requested the government to consider postponing the exam. Having got a no for an answer, they decided to hold the march from 1.00PM to 4.00 PM, so as not to inconvenience the students taking the exam. Ironically, not the march but the police succeeded in doing what they alleged the march would do. Today, many students found it nearly impossible to reach the exam centres on time, as the police put up nearly 500 additional check posts, instructed everyone setting out to carry an identity card, closed off several roads and diverted traffic to bylanes!!

When the largely young male crowd reached the Tank Bund, breaking the iron barricades or scaling the tank bund, there were no leaders to address them nor was there any programme till in the evening when the pledge for Telangana was to take place. The police had detained all the JAC leaders early in the morning and denied them permission to hold a meeting. Since no vehicles were permitted nor the shops allowed to open, there were no arrangements for drinking water. 

For the past few months, the agitation had been picking up in all the parts of the Telangna. Srikrishna Committee report was slammed, burnt and burial rites conducted at several places. Several forums had come out with specific critiques of the report. Students have been boycotting exams in all the universities. Their marches, dharnas or protests have been continuously teargassed and fired at with rubber bullets. Lawyers have boycotted courts, sought represenation in promotions, marched in Delhi and even attracted strictures against protesting from the Supreme court. Employees went on a non-cooperation movement for sixteen days. The government came to a halt in Telangna leading to the historic instance of non-payment of salaries to nearly 4 lakh employees on the 1st of this month. 

Employees played favourite games or organized Telangna Dhoom Dham at offices. Telangana Dhoom Dham, a cultural programme had come to articulate the grievances of the regions's people in local idiom and culture - sucidies of farmers, problems faced by school students due to the imposition of standard Telugu, large scale unemployement among the youth, dispalcement due to Special Economic Zones or mining policies, irrigational inequalities plaguing its agriculture, drought and migration in Mahboobnagar, flourosis in Nalgonda due to lack of safe drinking water. The idiom is not of heroism but of loss and anguish.

By the end of last month, one heard that fatigue was creeping in among the people, of keeping thier lives on hold for this agitation, of immense frustration about the inaction of the politicians, of the indifference of the central government to the loss of lives in the region and the broken promises. Despite the occasional slogans of elimination of the enemies of Telangana, one never saw violence breaking out against any migrants from Coastal Andhra who are to be found in almost every nook and corner of Telangana districts. There has been some burning of buses and police vehicles over the last one year. The government of course responsed by slapping thousands of cases against the agitators, especially the students, which were withdrawn only after combined opposition was joined by the ruling party MLAs to demand their withdrawal.  

The breaking of statues was obviously not an act of heated emotions. Despite the appearances of sentiments, emotion and passion among all the agitators, which is used to denigrate the movement and its goals, to any close observer, it is very clear that not a single one of the programmes in the last year's movement would have succeeded without careful planning. From 2009 onwards, hundreds of big meetings have been organized, where the least attendence is 10,000. Smaller meetings are even more numerous. The famous Warangal meeting last year had more than a lakh attending. Marches and bandhs in Telangana and Hyderabad, including to the Assembly must require a great deal of prior prepatration. The statues were chosen with precision, identifying which belonged to which region, vandalized and some were 'immersed' in water. 

The young men were in mood to listen. All the women activists were obviously shocked, tried to plead with them, explain or prevent them. But, women, like in all other programmes of the movement were outnumbered. The number of women on Tank Bund was within three to four hundred. The women students were conspicuous by their absence, despite being such a major and integral part of the student movement. Coming from first generation agricultural families, they want employment and a suitable marriage. Like thier male colleagues, they cannot afford long periods of education, at the end of which there was no hope of employment. Telangana state, for them means a secure future, where their parents can cultivate the land with assured irrigation, where they can get an employment and look forward to a peaceful married life. Though militant, very few seem interested in thinking beyond the issue of Telangana and thier future there. The few women students who have emerged as leaders are not ready to be accepted into the existing formations - political parties or joint action committies.

Representation has not been an easy issue for the Telangana movement. Leaving aside the games of the political parties, the leadership of the movement has been a steadily contested issue. Muslims, backward castes and Dalits have consistently critiqued the emergence of Prof.Kodand Ram as a leader. Mahila Joint Action Committee, Gaddar's Praja Front and several Joint action committees of Osmania University reflect this dissatisfaction. Issues of representation have been discussed with some depth in smaller gatherings too. Million March is perhaps the first event in which all these committees and fomations worked together, brushing aside the discomfort of the Telangana Rastra Samiti with the event and not even bothering about the support from other political parties. 

The overenthusiasm of the Telangana Rastra Samiti activists in vandalizing the statues was hard to be missed. "Is there any statue here which belongs to Telangana region? Why don't they ever put up 'our' people's statues here?" They ignored our attempts at placating them: that there are a few statues of Telangan people, that the statues they were trying to break were of ancient poets who form our common cultural heritage, that they had nothing do to with the current situation in Telangana, that once the Telangana state gets announced, we could have the statues or 'our' own people. In fact, they seemed puzzled by this attachment to the statues. An anguished 20 year old boy whom we tried to prevent screamed at us, "My life has gone (to dogs). I don't care for life or future. And you are worried about these statues?" 

As if to reinforce his anguish, when I reached home, the headlines, scrolls and panel discussions on seven to eight Telugu news channels was not about how and why the government and the police responded to a simple mode of agitation of marching on tankbund with such repressive measures. It was predictably about vandalism, violence, entry of 'other' (read Maoist) elements into Telangana movement and the great dishonour to Telugu culture!!

Posted in the Tracking Telangana blog.