HYDERABAD: When one needs solace, one turns to God. K Chandrasekhara Rao, the man spearheading the Telangana movement, surely needs it urgently.
Telangana has seen everything in the past one year: statehood promised and belied, a series of civil disobedience movements, violence and vandalism. But the Lady at 10, Janpath is yet to shower her grace on Rao and his band of separatists. That’s why he turned to the divine by performing a three-day Sata Chandi Yagam to invoke the blessings of goddess Chandi.
It was a ritual performed to alleviate the adverse effects of the planets on people and individuals, relieve mankind of troubles and neutralise negative energies coming in the way of development (in this case, those opposing a Telangana state). The priests chanted the mantras/slokas a hundred times. In a Sahasra Chandi Yagam, they would have to do one thousand.
Political leaders opposed to Rao are barracking him. “Where is the need for the TRS if Telangana can be achieved through yagams?” questioned one of them, while a TDP leader remarked that Rao is doing it for the well-being of his own family and not the people of Telangana.
But Rao is not alone in turning to the gods to achieve political objectives.
The late Y S Rajasekhara Reddy used to visit Jerusalem before or after an election. A known opponent of the division of Andhra Pradesh, did he pray that the thought of granting a separate Telangana state never cross the mind of Sonia Gandhi? TDP chief Nara Chandrababu Naidu, no doubt, had an electoral tie-up with the TRS in 2009 but that was more of a political exigency than any love for Telangana. So when he visited Tirumala to seek the blessings of Lord Venkateswara, did he implore the Lord to bring him back to power without any giving any leverage to the TRS? For that matter, governor E S L Narasimham, is known to visit a temple almost every day. It is difficult to fathom what his prayers are but Telanganites strongly believe that if there is one major stumbling block for a Telangana state, it is the man occupying Raj Bhavan.
If indeed the prayers of those major worthies were to block Telangana, Rao had strong barriers to hurdle by way of his recent Chandi Yagam. As one Telangana supporter put it, the Yagam was a ‘counter petition’ before the Goddess to neutralise the negative energies blocking a Telangana state. Rao is not the only Telangana protagonist who has turned to the gods.
Balladeer Gadar, a non-believer and Maoist, began his Telangana yatra after visiting a Bhadrachalam temple.
Hindu mythology is all about yagams. Whether it was Arjuna or Ravana, both are said to have acquired supernatural powers by performing yagnas. Rao perhaps thought that if Goddess Sonia doesn’t deliver Telangana, Goddess Chandi would.