Internal rifts can hurt India’s rise

Two negative results have flowed from last week’s sudden announcement by the Union home minister on the Telangana question. One concerns the government (and therefore India in a wider sense), and the other the Congress Party. Suddenly, the country has had to reorient its focus to looking inward and introspect. The news is not good. To pressing issues of internal security and the alarming price situation has now been added the mushrooming of demands for new states in all parts of the country. Before this, India was happily looking outward. Because of the high growth rates it has been notching up of late, a host of countries wanted to engage with it at a deeper level. India had also acquired a higher salience in multilateral forums dealing with world finance, economy and trade, climate change and the nuclear conundrum. Requiring urgent attention were also bilateral dealings with Pakistan, China and the United States. But suddenly all the news is about protest fasts and outbreaks of violence to press for regional and ethnic demands. A whirlpool of this sort saps national energy and an enervated nation cannot adequately cope with the fast-paced dynamics of the external environment. At a party-political level, the Congress appears to have scored an own goal. It has disturbed its own equanimity in Andhra Pradesh, one of only two states in the country (the other is Rajasthan) where it is in power without the assistance of allies and where in the normal course it could aspire to return to power. Regardless of when Telangana will be formed — if it comes into being at all — the Congress Party appears to have placed its goodwill and leadership position on the bargaining counter. In the process, it may also have ceded to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti the top spot in districts that are meant to make up the new state. This can hardly be a satisfactory position to be in for a party which is seeking to make a long-term comeback across the country. In some ways, Mr P. Chidambaram’s unexpected Telangana announcement is not unlike the fateful decision to permit “shilanyas” in Ayodhya, which — for different reasons — had made both Hindus and Muslims unhappy, making the Congress fall between two stools. The situation is not irretrievable, but helplessly watching the law and order situation deteriorate in different parts of Andhra Pradesh, and elsewhere in the country, in the name of pressing for regional aspirations will hardly do. Sending the Andhra Pradesh Assembly into hibernation is also not a solution. If meaningful political steps are not taken, the House will degenerate into chaos, no matter when it meets again. The Congress will do well to pay attention to what those actions might be in the context of Andhra Pradesh politics and its own party dynamics in that state. The Centre has done well to let the finance minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, declare that no more demands for new states can be brought under consideration. The Prime Minister has also done now what he should have done earlier, that is, bring its government allies into consultation on the matter of small states. These steps need to be followed up by strict administrative methods to ensure that the law and order situation does not come under strain in Andhra Pradesh.