Media, Nationalism and Globalization

The Telangana Movement and Indian Politics

Sumanth Inukonda

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535642
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book explores the meanings of nationalism in a post-globalization, postcolonial context. It provides an in-depth understanding of the relationship between marginalized groups, media and politics by a focused study of the Telangana movement in India.

Events like the Arab Spring, unrest in Myanmar and Ukraine, and the Brexit, Kurdish and Catalan referendums have proved how catalytic the changing media environment has been in reshaping the nature of resistance and social movements. Based on the author's ethnographic research, this book examines how marginalized groups engage with the media and their community to participate in political processes. Analyzing public meetings, folk performances, pamphlets and media reports of the Telangana movement, the author reflects on the cultural notions of nationalism and the politics of state formation in the post-colonial context. This volume also evaluates the role of students and intellectuals in contemporary social movements and in uniting the discontents of globalization.

Highlighting intersections of performativity, geography and justice, this book examines changing articulations of identity and everyday forms of resistance. It will be useful for students and research scholars interested in media and communication, cultural studies, political sciences, ethnic and minority studies and sociocultural movements in India.

Chapter 1
Introduction

“National movements are regaining popularity, and nations that had once assimilated and ‘vanished’ have now reappeared.”

Yael Tamir (1993, p. 3)

With instances of the “Arab Spring,” or the recent unrest in Myanmar, Ukraine and Venezuela, or the Scottish, Brexit, Kurdish and Catalan referendums perhaps we are encountering issues of contested ideas of the nation with diverse stakeholders. Some stakeholders are indigenous, including the marginalized struggling to find their voice in the nation, and some of the players are exogenous, ranging from diasporic groups to big powers who seek to influence changes to ideas of the nation, ones that may better serve their own interests. Marginalized groups are realizing the potential of collective mobilization, often using the communication technologies to make their demands heard through protests and sometimes disruptive voting. With the emergence of new protests movements (such as Occupy) as agents of social change, there is a greater need to investigate media and communication practices of activists. Changing media environments including digitization and social media are actively reshaping the nature of resistance and social movements.

Formation of a new state on the basis of popular demand is an exceptional event. On June 2, 2014, a new state of Telangana was created through bifurcation of predominantly Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, thereby creating the newest entrant to the Indian Union – its 29th state. Telangana region was merged with Andhra State in 1956 to form Andhra Pradesh, which was the first state formed under the linguistic principle. It was an uneasy merger right from the start, with a bloody student agitation for separation (from Andhra and not India) in 1969 that led to the killing of over 300 students from police fire. This study analyzes the growing demand for Telangana’s separation again since the mid-1990s and its subsequent state-hood. This book reexamines the Telangana movement and significance of mediated nationalism/sub-nationalisms in the contemporary political life of globalized India. The focal point of analysis is the interplay of media, nationalism and globalization in Telangana from the perspective of marginalized groups in the region. In this study, the focus is on the role the media plays in bringing these issues into the public domain – or preventing these issues from coming into the public gaze – and the processes that constitute such media.

Through examination of how specific marginalized groups understand and use media and communication to participate in political processes, we can gain a better understanding of hegemonic and counterhegemonic aspects of nationalism. The study also evaluates the participation of teachers and students in the Telangana movement that has implications for the discussion about the role of intellectuals in contemporary social movements. Last, a focused study of Telangana can lead to more generalizable insights into the relationship between globalization and nationalism.

Sub-nationalism and the federal systems

There has been political and academic debate on the impact of ethnic homogeneity of provinces on federal stability. With respect to experience in the eastern bloc, it has been argued that ethnically homogeneous states can lead to secession (Bunce, 1999). Ethnic nations like Catalonia in Spain and Kurd-istan in Iraq have recently voted for secession. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, too believed that sub-nationalism could undermine the power of the central government and lead to narrow-minded parochialism and was negatively predisposed to the idea of ethnolinguistic states within India. However, it is now widely accepted that this ability to redraw state boundaries on the basis of ethnic demands is one of the strengths of Indian democracy (Bermeo, 2002; Yadav, 2011).

There are several cases of federal restructuring internationally. The most extreme example of federal restructuring is that of Nigeria, which has created 36 states from the three regions it started out with at independence, all during periods of military rule (Suberu, 2001). Brazil established the new state of Tocantins and upgraded Amapa and Roraima to full statehood in 1988 when a new constitution was approved after the end of the military regime (Souza, 1997). All three states are located in Brazil’s sparsely populated “north region.” In 1999, Canada created the province of Nunavut from its Northwest Territories as a means of accommodating Inuit claims for a homeland and for their rights to manage land and natural resources (Inuits form over 80% of Nunavut’s population) (Tillin, 2013). In 1979, Switzerland created the new canton of Jura after a referendum.

In India, Article 3 of the constitution empowers the federal parliament to create new states unilaterally by separating territory from any state, to merge states, increase or diminish territory of states and change the name of states. Before the creation of Telangana state, there were at least four phases of revisions to state boundaries that India had undertaken since independence in 1947; these involved the merging of princely states into India at independence, the creation of linguistic states between 1956 and 1966, the creation of states for minority communities from Assam in northeast India between the 1960s and the 1980s and the creation of three new states in the ‘Hindi-heartland’ of North and Central India in the year 2000 (Tillin, 2013).

Soon after independence, when princely states were subsumed in India, the states tended to be multilingual or multiethnic, a legacy carried forward from British India. For instance, Hyderabad state, annexed in 1948, included regions where Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and Urdu were spoken. It was often unwieldy to run administration in multiple languages. Propelled by the calls to safeguard culture and administrative convenience, the demands for ethnic and linguistic states were growing. In 1952, Potti Sriramulu had fasted until death for carving out a Telugu-speaking state from Madras Precedency. Widespread agitations after his death catalyzed the biggest reorganization of states in Independent India. The States Reorganization Committee (SRC) was instituted in 1953 and recommended creation of states on a linguistic basis in view of multiplicity of such demands from various regions in the country. The States Reorganization Act was passed in 1956, which reorganized several states in India including a merger of two Telugu-speaking regions of Andhra (including Rayalaseema) and Telangana into Andhra Pradesh state.

The new states in India

A more recent instance of major state reorganization was in 2000 when three new states – Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand – were carved out of existing states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar respectively. Tillin (2013) identifies four political and academic arguments offered in support of small states. First, the emergence on new states in India in 2000 primarily represents the growing strength of statehood movements that are articulated in terms of “cultural identity and regional deprivation” (Tillin, 2013, p. 4). It is instructive to see how Telangana stacks up against these three states. Telangana Rastra Samiti was formed in 2001 and started demanding formation of Telangana, which was a much older demand than these three states.

Telangana and Andhra were merged on the basis of the common spoken language of Telugu. However, there are differences in dialect, with dialects spoken in Telangana considered as rustic by those in Andhra. The Telangana movement posits Telangana as a distinct cultural unit that suffered deprivation under Andhra rule. The Srikrishna Committee, set up by the Government of India, submitted its report (2011) on the situation in Telangana. This report is a rich source of primary and secondary information on the state of marginalization in the region. Other historical documents dating to the 1970s detail issues of economic and social disparity between the Telangana and Andhra regions. There are differences in geography, irrigation, education and caste composition – some details follow in the next section and next chapters. Such differences have in 2000 been justified as the basis for creating new states even when the language spoken by both states was the same.

As Alfred Stepan, Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav (2011) write:

In India the multicultural characteristics are the result of a long history [as opposed to immigration from other societies] and have a distinctive territorial basis, to which India federalism has been a response. Witness the creation of the new linguistic states in the 1950s and the process of creating new states that continues to this day. It should be noted that although the creation of three states (Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) in 2000 was not based on languages, it did reflect the logic of political representation of diversities, for these states gave better representation to tribal population (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh) or otherwise socioculturally different groups (Uttarakhand).

Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are resource-rich tribal states; in the 1960s and 1980s, tribal differences have been the basis for state formation in India’s northeast. Uttarakhand is a Himalayan hill state that was separated from Uttar Pradesh (UP), which is based in Gangetic plains. There are also differences in caste composition, with traditional upper castes being more numerous in Uttarakhand than UP.

Second, since it is the federal parliament and government that decides on new states, political parties and political calculations play an important role in federal restructuring. For a long time, Congress was the sole national party, any change to state boundaries had to have its support. This explains relative stability in state boundaries since the State Reorganization Act was passed in 1956. The renewed focus on federal restructuring has to do with the era of coalition politics that dawned in 1989. Between 1989 and 2014, no single political party could get the minimum required seats to govern on its own. This phase is characterized by a quest for stable governing coalitions and increasing influence of regional parties over national polity. After series of unstable and ‘minority’ governments, towards the end of the 1990s, regional political parties coalesced around the Congress and BJP. While the former appealed to secular ideology to build alliance with powerful socialist satraps, the latter sought to build new alliances by supporting regional demands for smaller states, claiming smaller states would improve governance.

Interests of various political parties that had stakes in undivided states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh converged to support formation of the three new states. The Congress, BJP and regional parties like Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha had support bases across different regions and did not see the three new states as a threat to their base. For instance, Samajwadi Party was based in Uttar Pradesh without much support in Uttarakhand, and Uttarakhand politics is dominated by the Congress and BJP since state formation. However, in Andhra Pradesh, Andhra-based interests across party lines were dead against granting state-hood to Telangana. At the same time, owing to the increasing strength of Telangana movement, political parties contesting in Telangana especially since 2008 could not be seen as being unsympathetic to the demand for a separate state.

The third and fourth reasons pertain to administrative and economic rational that play a role in state formation (Tillin, 2013). Often, common culture and language leads to ease of administration. India’s population has quadrupled from around 300 million to 1.2 billion since independence. Formation of additional states can be justified on the grounds of such increase in population. Andhra Pradesh had a population of 30 million in 1956 when Andhra and Telangana were merged. When the separation came about in 2014, the two states Telangana and Andhra Pradesh each had a population in excess of 40 million. An added complication arose due to the location of the capital. Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh did not hold the capital city of the undivided state within their proposed territory. Unlike the three states formed in year 2000, the capital and the biggest economic center of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, is located within the region seeking secession.

The desire to intensify extraction of natural resources within the context of economic globalization can in principle lead to a search for viable states that possess natural resources like coal, iron ore, bauxite and so forth. Jharkhand is ranked first in production of iron ore, copper ores, mica, kainite, uranium and asbestos and ranked third in production of coal in India. Chhattisgarh is ranked second in coal production in India. However, it is hard to establish a causal link between economic globalization and formation of new states. There is also a danger that dividing a state might jeopardize regional economy. The British realized this the hard way when in order to foster religious division, they partitioned Bengal in 1905. Raw materials grown in the eastern part of the state were sent to the western industrial town of Calcutta. The division disturbed the regional economy and was one of the reasons for its reunification in 1911 (Nag, 2011).

To a question regarding the basis for formation of a new state, the then resident editor of the Times of India in Hyderabad, Kingshuk Nag (Interviewee 17), stated soon after the 2014 elections:

There is no basis, it is created on the basis of demands … so a great idea for one man Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) is to break states so that you don’t have powerful chief ministers. So, instead of 30 CMs if there are 50 CMs each of them will not be (as) powerful so from his perspective he will try to break. But, from the perspective of big business which he is also represented (representing), they want unified markets, they don’t want small states. So they have to deal with lesser (fewer) authorities lesser number of authorities.

This statement indicates the contradictory pulls associated with changing status quo of state boundaries. While a strong Prime Minister might be tempted to enhance his power by breaking down a large state, it is not the sole consideration. There are also often questions about viability of small states that might not generate enough revenues for their own survival. There could be several disruptions in economy and polity including prospects of political parties that new states might create. More states result in more election cycles that generate greater uncertainty for national and regional political parties. Since Prime Minister Modi took office in 2014, in a historic election that saw a party getting majority in parliament on its own for the first time in 30 years, no new states have been formed. For instance, in 2017, Modi-led BJP opposed a popular demand for Gorkhaland in the hills of West Bengal after it had supported the demand in 2009 and 2014 elections.

Each the four explanations “overstates the extent to which the act of state creation served the interests of any one group or set of actors” (Tillin, 2013, pp. 4–5). In order to understand the realigning of social forces in support of new states, long-term assessment of political processes is needed. The first component of such process in Telangana is the changing caste relations during the 1970s between landlords and peasant and artisan communities. These changes made it possible to forge an alliance between these historically opposed groups on regional lines. The second component is the growing demands for empowerment from the grassroots level that generated disaffection to the status quo of Andhra-based upper-caste political domination by lower castes. The third component is globalization of Indian economy and increased mediation of politics in the 1990s. These far-reaching changes brought forth increasing inequality and intensification of the identity politics based on caste, tribe and region. This was the new economic and social context that led to the revival of the Telangana movement.

Brief history of the Telangana movement

Telangana is a region in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India that was formerly part of Hyderabad State. Hyderabad State was a suzerain princely state in British India. The Nizam was the royal monarch of Hyderabad, and Urdu was its official language. Following decolonization, the princely Indian states were annexed into India and Pakistan. The Indian union was created through the annexation; states do not have the right to secede now. The Hyderabad State comprised the Telugu-speaking Telangana, the Kannada-speaking Dharwad and Marathi-speaking Berar regions. Apart from these groups, Hyderabad has had a sizable Urdu- and Telugu-speaking Muslim population. The Nizam was not in favor of joining the Indian union and wanted an independent state. When Razakars unleashed a reign of terror in support of Nizam, the newly independent Indian union annexed Hyderabad in 1948 through “police action.”

Between 1946 and 1951, Telangana was the site of a peasant rebellion. Most accounts of the Telangana struggle do not pay adequate attention to the peasant rebellion, which displayed a class-based cleavage in the society; most scholars focus on the ethnic or regional dimensions of the subsequent conflict (Horowitz, 1985; Weiner, 1978). The local peasants had spontaneously erupted against their oppressive landlords. The rebellion mutated into armed communist insurgency when the Communist Party of India (CPI) armed the rebelling peasants (Thirumali, 2003). This arming of the movement led to the usurpation of the leadership by the communists.

The police action that had seized the Hyderabad State and annexed it into the Indian union continued to quell the rebellion and fight communist influence in the region. In 1953, the States Reorganization Committee (SRC) established by the Government of India recommended that states be constituted on linguistic basis. This would have meant that the Hyderabad State (in existence from 1952 to 1956) would be broken up and its various linguistic regions would join the adjoining states of Bombay, Mysore and Andhra. It is this merger of Telangana with Telugu-speaking Andhra that was the bone of contention. The Andhra region is composed of the fertile Krishna-Godavari delta that is known for high agricultural productivity. Also, as the region was under direct British rule for many years, it benefited from English-medium education. The SRC cautioned against the hasty merger of the two Telugu-speaking regions due to their wide disparities. It is known that then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was unfavorably disposed to the idea of merger and likened it to the imperialist expansion of Andhra, detrimental to Telangana. Nevertheless, the issue was left to the two states to sort out.

There were significant inequities between the regions. With a literacy rate that was almost 50% less than the rest of the state, Telangana joined Andhra Pradesh, a merger that was subject to a series of safeguards called “Gentleman’s Agreement” (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Postcolonial nationalism
• 3 The discourse of globalization
• 4 Media and imperialism
• 5 Mobilizing identities
• 6 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index