Contrary to apprehensions, the Justice Srikrishna Committee report to be out on Thursday will not leave scope for any section to agitate, for the committee will give several options, including carving out a separate Telangana state and justify every option.
A senior bureaucrat pointed out that the committee report would only be a comma but not full stop to the burning T-issue. “The committee is expected to give various solutions and provide a strong base with statistics as well as reasoning for the Centre to implement any of the solutions,” a top state official told this newspaper.
The Centre will release the report after Union home minister P. Chidambaram’s meeting with the representatives of eight political parties in the national capital on Thursday.
Sources said the voluminous report is likely to contain a couple of suggestions, including retaining the united Andhra Pradesh by providing constitutional guarantees for spending in backward regions on the lines of Bodoland Territorial Council and carving out Telangana and building separate capitals for both the states, leaving Hyderabad as a separate entity.
As reported earlier, the committee did not give credence to the rhetoric of separate statehood for Telangana because it was backward. The committee concluded that its study showed several T-districts faring better than some districts in other regions on vital growth parameters.
Sources said the committee keenly studied the BTC accord in Assam which allows the council to levy and collect taxes and decide on the spending pattern. Though it is not clear whether the committee would recommend the BTC in toto, sources said the members were of the strong view that constitutional guarantee for release of funds for development of backward regions will put to rest the agitations stemming out of discriminatory funding patterns.
Meanwhile, the ruling Congress itself undermined the significance of Thursday’s meeting by stating that the government would merely hand over the copies of the report and seek parties’ reactions at a later date. The Congress representative for the meeting, Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy, had announced that there would be subsequent meetings to discuss the report. The TRS and BJP already boycotted the meeting.
The BJP, on the other hand, appealed to people not to react emotionally to the outcome of SKC as a political decision on T had anyway to be taken by the Centre. “The report is immaterial. Even if it recommended separate state it will not materialise unless Centre moved on it,” said BJP state president G. Kishan Reddy.
“The very purpose of constituting the committee is to restore normalcy in the state. How can the report light the fire again,” a committee member is said to have pointed out to the political leaders during an informal interaction.
The committee members also indicated that the pros and cons of each solution would be discussed in detail and no negative inferences should be taken out of any particular observation.