The cynical state of Telangana

I am one of those dreamy political scientists who always makes wishlists and scenarios of “What if”. I am always waiting for new conversations of intersecting categories. I believe Hyderabad can be the centre for one major encounter. The Srikrishna Commission report on the possibility of Telangana has been released. It is a

500-page report and needs detailed study. While the report is being pursued, a smaller, quieter event will take place in Hyderabad between January 10 and 14. It is the meeting of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. What one hopes is a conversation between the debate for small states and the dream of the new commons.
The debate on small states usually operates in terms of the language of decentralisation, of governance, of the rhetoric of small is beautiful. It usually follows three grids — the economic, the political and the cultural.
The plea for the small state usually stems from a negative sentiment. There is a sense of internal colonialism of economic discrimination. Telangana feels that the benefits of development are going to coastal Andhra Pradesh.
To the sense of economic hegemony and distorted development is added the logic of culture. Culture with the help of media creates imagined communities which organise around language, a past, a collective sense of history. The two together combine to provide the grammar for a particular kind of politics.
The logic of small states operates then through a particular kind of populism and electoralism. The idea of Telangana was seen as a political Camelot. What electoral politics also exposes is the horse-trading, the promissory notes, the negotiations and the betrayals. Political power becomes the only way of creating the envisioned community.
The majority, in the meanwhile, attempts to create or subvert the imagination. Sociologies confront each other, statistics acquires a political colour and every protest becomes a law and order problem.
Watching as an outsider one witnesses a frozen script on both sides. The categories of small confront the categories of larger unified states and what one witnesses are standard scripts on both sides reduced to a report card of grievances.
The question one asks is, is there a way to evade such frozen scripts because the battle of small states versus big states has become a sterile battle. It, no doubt, captures the populist imagination but barely questions the categories of development, progress and globalisation or add any new sense of welfare or justice. The battle is reduced to competition, between grievance and indifference or unity versus disintegration.
The idea of the commons provides a different imagination for such a debate. An idea of the commons goes beyond the common sense of federalism. A commons is a space beyond the formal rules of market and current politics. A commons is a space of refugee, a place where ordinary people can access nature as food, as timber or as medicine. A commons is a community of sharing and sustainability. A commons is a place where each man operates according to his needs. A commons conveys a community of reciprocity and responsibility which goes beyond the logic of individualism. Development and market deny the idea of commons by emphasising restrictive access to production and distribution.
I want to argue that the idea of commons provides a different measure of evaluation. A commons deals with livelihood issues by connecting economics to livelihood, to ways of life of a community. A commons creates an embedded ecology which relates communities to livelihood. The idea of the commons creates an ethics of scale rather than size. It tries to communicate a multiplicity of problem-solving techniques. Plurality rather than power is the new option.
The idea of Telangana and the idea of Andhra Pradesh are not different currently. Both failed to question the current idea of politics, economics and administration. To apply current models, to ignore the problem of farmer suicides does not really regionalise development. A region has to be more than geography as space; it has to be an alternative idea of democracy.
The Srikrishna report, for all its diligence, adds little to the democratic imagination. Sadly, the movement for Telangana while showing the flaws of electoral democracy has added little in terms of the creativity of locality or the power of diversity. I am not saying that we should not grant Telangana. All I am contending is that Telangana as an imagination should have a sense of the commons linked to the globe in a way that locality is not a parochial idea. It has to have a sense of scale not size. It has to embody new notions of problem solving. Ask yourself what new notions of ecology, agriculture, education and power sharing does either side add to the new democratic imagination. Each side by insisting on Hyderabad is showing a common commitment to the standard policies of economics and politics. I want to ask where are the new theories of the informal economy? Where are the new ideas of social audit? Can we name one theory for better livelihoods on one side?
The challenge of Telangana has to challenge more than the current idea of statehood. Merely creating a new power elite for Telangana is not enough. The question we have to ask is what is the social imagination of both movements? The answer now is none.
It is a mirroring of politics and economics where one hoped for a richer imagination of statehood.
The real challenge is can Andhra Pradesh and Telangana offer a new or alternative theories of agriculture, new ways of watershed management, alternative ways to combat forced migrations to the city. Is there a new theory of governance? What is the new theory of the city? Can we link formal and informal economies through a new idea of the commons? Can Hyderabad become a new commons for both the states? To think this way one has to go beyond the current ideas of Union Territories as sanitary corridors of administrative convenience.
I always honour moves to decentralisation but such efforts have to add to real empowerment. The Telangana movement is a student-led movement and as students are a part of the intelligence I hope they make such issues a part of their agenda. Only then will its politics not go the way of Jharkhand and add to a cynical view of life.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist