Battleground Hyderabad
People ask why there’s so much frenzy over the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. And they point out how Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand were created without any great fuss. The comparison is naive. The fact is that the issue is no longer about the creation of a separate Telangana; that is how it might have started out, but today the issue is who gets the keys to the city of Hyderabad. There is simply too much money and power at stake in this great IT and pharma hub for any of the political players (and other assorted interests) to give up without a fight to the finish. The fact that we’re seeing such chaos today is not, as some talking heads on TV have suggested, because the creation of Telangana has come as a surprise to anybody. For the past couple of years, everybody in Andhra Pradesh has known it was coming—and that it would come in 2013, probably some time between October and December, timed with the 2014 elections in mind. No, the real reason for the current chaos is the inevitable, desperate, last-ditch battle for control of Hyderabad. Because it’s a battle where the stakes are enormous, where winner takes all, and the devil takes the hindmost. All of which says a great deal about the state of our polity today, not to mention the state of our nation.
Time to reorganise?
The British, in the 1860s, created a policy that was wonderfully named ‘The Policy of Masterly Inactivity’. In short, doing nothing, but doing it with style. Which is sometimes not a bad policy to follow: Indira Gandhi favoured it, and P.V. Narasimha Rao perfected it. It’s a policy the Congress party has pursued in connection with Telangana over the years, as part of its cautious approach to avoid a proliferation of states, which dates back to the 1950s. But now the time has come for us to seriously consider a Second States Reorganisation Commission. For one thing, the 28 states we currently have (excluding Telangana) to govern a population of over 1.2 billion seem to be stretching administrative resources very thin. The United States, by contrast, has 50 states to govern a population of 310 million, and if we go by that benchmark, for example, we’d have 200 states, each with a population smaller than Uttarakhand. (The population of UP is over 200 million—two-thirds the size of the US—which may well explain the state of its governance.) Such a reorganisation of states would, of course, be a complex exercise that would need to be carried out with a largeness of mind and heart, guided by economic, sociological and administrative factors—and not merely for political or “emotional” reasons. The question is, when will we be ready for that?
Money, money, money
There seems to be a wonderfully synergistic business model that has evolved here over the past two decades: one brother is a minister; the second brother runs a diversified business empire; and if there’s a third brother, he’s in the Opposition, just by way of insurance. In the absence of a brother, you can always look to someone else from your family/community/caste, in that order. As business models go, it seems pretty robust. Meanwhile, the amount of money swirling around in the city boggles the mind. And signs of it pop up everywhere. A client, during a meeting about customer segments, informed me: “Upper income group means a net worth of Rs 100 crore. Anything less is just middle class.” It turned out he wasn’t being flippant. More recently, a neighbour of mine who seems to do nothing very special said to me, casually: “You know, people like you and me, who have a net worth of Rs 100-200 crore....” I suppose I should have been flattered to be included in this peer group. And yet a banker friend told me that his bank was shutting down its wealth management department in Hyderabad because of a lack of business opportunities. When I expressed surprise, he explained patiently, “Sure, there’s a lot of money in Hyderabad, it’s just that it’s not necessarily available for investment in shares and mutual funds”, suggesting, of course, that it tends to be in cash. Interestingly, even the vision of Hyderabad’s beggars seems to have ballooned in proportion: a man came up to me on the road some time ago and asked for money. While I was fishing unobtrusively in my pocket for a suitable amount to give him, he told me he wanted Rs 20,000.
What if?
Interesting counter-factual: When Potti Sriramulu agitated for a separate state for the Telugu people to be carved out of the Madras presidency in 1952, he demanded Madras city as its capital. Instead, the new Andhra state got Kurnool, before the capital ultimately shifted to Hyderabad in 1956. If Andhra had indeed gotten Madras as its capital back then, the creation of Telangana would have probably been a whole lot easier.
Hyder power
A businessman with interests in Silicon Valley tells me that land in parts of Hyderabad is more expensive than land in California. Jai Hyderabad!
Anvar Alikhan is a Hyderabad-based advertising professional and columnist.; E-mail your diarist: anvaro AT hotmail.com
