A republic of sub-nations?

The just-concluded Intensive Household Survey-2014 by the Government of Telangana has been one of the most massive operations launched by any state government in recent times. In itself, it is not something bizarre. It is a logical consequence of the whole agitation that resulted in the formation of the new state recently.

The new government would certainly like to start afresh, with latest data on the socio-economic condition of the people whom it has to govern.

An important objective of the survey seems to be the assessment of actual number of Below Poverty Line (BPL) households.

This vital information would enable the Government to deliver welfare schemes to persons and households for whom they are intended.

It would result in the ‘weeding out’ of ‘bogus’ claimants. This is indeed a bold and a laudable move and it would do well for other state governments to follow suit.

A survey of concern We believe that the problem is not with the survey as such. It is about the current socio-historical context in the region in which this exercise has been conducted.

The context currently is vitiated with suspicion, uncertainty, anxiety, etc, and anything unfamiliar is likely to cause torment and agitation in some people’s minds who would anticipate a catastrophe coming their way.

We are referring to citizens from Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra regions who had migrated to Telangana in general and to Hyderabad in particular. They are derisively referred to as ‘settlers’, ‘colonisers’ and so on by the agitators for Telangana.

The survey was supposed to probe vital facts regarding land ownership, caste status, etc apart from the most controversial issue of ‘nativity’.

The Telangana government had contended that only persons resident in the State since 1956 or earlier belong to Telangana and can access the benefits under the welfare schemes (This was the year in which the region of Telangana was merged with Andhra and Rayalaseema regions to form the state of Andhra Pradesh).

The perception of ‘Seemandhras’ was that this was a move to weed them out of Telangana state for being ‘outsiders’. Only time will tell whether their perceptions were genuine or otherwise.

However, the discourse of internal colonialism has to be questioned, where a citizen of one country can be considered as a settler or coloniser in another part of the same nation.

Even in this discourse, one class or any other organised group tends to exploit the people in general belonging to another area or region within a nation.

But can one region (subsuming class, caste, religion, etc,) exploit another, in terms of colonisation? Could it not be that the very logic and process of development creates unevenness with areas of prosperity existing along with areas of deprivation, for instance?

For capital and State In the present case it has been Hyderabad. It is thus held by many that the current problem has been not due to lack of development but because of it!

That the battle for Telangana is really a battle for Hyderabad! The development of Hyderabad attracted many from far and wide and they came as investors, entrepreneurs and adventurers.

They also came as the dispossessed, as hawkers and petty vendors and as the proletariat and salariat for the emerging corporate capitalist enterprises.

It was the latter that created ‘Cyberabad’ for instance, in which the people came to work.

The same could be said of the various governmental institutions in the capital city. These were the objective requirements of capitalism and the State, and they worked to bring them about.

Both capital and the State required adequately skilled workforces and were agnostic to the socio-cultural or geographical antecedents of the workforce. This is the ubiquitous history of capitalist development.

Hyderabad’s predecessors have been Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata; now it is Delhi. In all these metropolises, development set off social reactions a consequentially; parochialism and the ‘sons of the soil’ argument being an example.

More development One solution to this problem is more and more development, an ‘unto the last’ approach, by which the last unemployed person would also find a job with degrees of gainfulness — a Benthamite idea of the largest good of the largest number. This idea can only be accepted with certain amount of scepticism.

The question is: what does it mean to be a citizen of India, what are one’s rights, what are the limitations to those rights, particularly in the matter of internal migration when migration is considered a universal ‘human right’?

Second, today, it is the people from one region who were considered ‘outsiders’ or ‘settlers’ in Telangana. The development of Hyderabad has attracted a huge number of migrants from other States such as Odisha and Bihar. They form a significant quantum of ‘non-local’ labour today across the occupational-professional spectrum. Tomorrow, some parochial articulation will gain momentum that Oriyas and Biharis are taking away or cornering job opportunities. Already, such an argument has been made in other contexts, for instance in Maharashtra.

The household survey in Telangana shows it is time for a national debate on citizenship, particularly on migration.

At the same time, public policy has to address the ‘regional’ and ‘local’ realities, too. Political parties should also desist, or statutorily be desisted, from making political capital out of problems that can be otherwise solved by administrative action and a balanced developmental vision of the state.

The writers are respectively faculty member and PhD scholar in the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad

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