Every morning and evening, Hyderabad’s rush-hour traffic gets gridlocked at the Punjagutta intersection. It is a maddening chaos of road-raged motorists, incoming and outgoing mall rats, autodrivers looking for custom and one harried traffic policeman. And in the midst of it all, right under the awnings of a flyover, stands a statue of YS Rajasekhara Reddy, some 15 ft high, daubed a golden bronze. It waves to the chaos in that cheery, don’t-worry-be-happy manner typical of the late chief minister.
No one knows how he got there. Ask the officers in the city’s busiest police station bang opposite, and they’ll tell you, gee whiz, we don’t know. Someone — a fan club or local Congressmen, who knows — put it there on July 8 this year. Obviously, it has no permission — which entails an impressive list of required activities: apply to the civic authority, get no-objection certificates from the traffic police, roads & buildings, power utility, have a resolution passed by the city fathers, and so on.
The traffic policeman could do without it. The statue gets in the way of traffic. But the police say, with no sense of irony, that they can’t just cart the thing away, they need permission to do so. Simply put, they need someone to hold their hand if Congressmen in the hood decide to make trouble over removing their dear departed leader from their midst.
People in Andhra Pradesh are watching bemused as the myth creation of YSR rolls around the state like a groundswell. One strand of this phenomenon is the installation of his statues. Taking a cue from Mayawati, the late chief minister’s son YS Jagan Mohan Reddy is barnstorming the state, presiding over statue installations in cities, towns, villages and hamlets. During the current leg of his Odarpu Yatra of Prakasam district, Jagan Reddy, an MP from Kadapa, is scheduled to unveil no less than 700 likenesses of Daddy. Back in July, he managed 253 in East Godavari, and 60 in Srikakulam the week before. And 150 in Khammam a month earlier. The family borough of Pulivendula, a little town much cosseted by the late leader, has already been covered: there are eight around town, with five more in the works.
The statue programme has no sanction from the Congress government but it is being dragged into it willy nilly. Sonia Gandhi
offered to Jagan Reddy that the government of K Rosaiah, no less an admirer of Dad, would install impressive statues of YSR in every district headquarter. The MP’s aides scoff at the offer. That’s 23 statues! Their plan is to erect one in every village of AP — some 10,000 in the months to come.
The MP’s men in towns like Chirala, Nellore, Kadapa, Khammam, Srikakulam are commissioning statues on their own and bullying local authorities into installing them wherever they please. In Kadapa Municipal Corporation limits alone, 30 statues have been erected, a couple of them even on national highways. In their zeal, they have elbowed aside already existing statues to make place for YSR. In Vempalle, for instance, they destroyed a lion capitol, the national emblem, at the Four Roads Circle the night after Independence Day. As is typical of their street smarts, they had contrived to get a resolution passed in the
local panchayat and tricked the district collector into believing nothing had existed at the spot. The demolition resulted in a public outcry and the case landed in the high court.
“Destroying the Asoka pillar was unpardonable, no less than insulting our national flag,’’ fumed local villager K Chelama Reddy.
The Jagan stormtroopers’ enthusiasm has run into opposition from the other parties and partisan groups who believe that local
authorities are being bullied into looking the other way. But in only one instance has the deification programme run into determined resistance. At Ambedkar Circle in Kadapa, J-campers took on Ambedkar himself, that icon of ubiquitous statuary. They smuggled in a statue of their lord and tried to erect it far too close to that of the Constitution giver. They beat a hasty retreat when angry Dalit leaders turned up at the works and made it clear they would share the airspace with no other .
Except in that case, YSR statues have had only limp opposition to contend with so far. The TDP, enfeebled by six years out of power, is piqued that the civic authorities use the rule book only to block their own N T Rama Rao statue programme but not against the Jagan brigade.
The rule book for statuary is pretty impressive. Government
Order 55 says any person, organisation and political party wanting to install a statue must apply to the district collector and submit clearances from the police, the roads & buildings department, the gram panchayat or municipality and Transco, the power utility. After getting all such clearances, the district collector still can withhold permission. There is a separate section in each district collectorate to look after statues. With local councils ruled by the Congress, and most local reps being people who were beneficiaries of YSR’s munificence, it is not very difficult for the J-men to get the requisite pieces of paper passed in the gram panchayats and town halls. As for the NOCs from utilities, there are ways of getting them.
Jagan Mohan Reddy’s statue programme is a fight to be the sole legatee of his father. The legacy is his only claim to power, and his pique with the Congress high command arises from its desire to have a share of it and his disinclination to share it.
In AP politics, statues have been an assertion of identity for minority groups, mainly the Scheduled Castes. No dalitwada in AP goes without a statue of Ambedkar, the image of the suited-booted scholar-statesman encapsulating the dreams of the Dalits. There are far more Ambedkar statues than Gandhi’s. This tactic, sharpened by Mayawati, was borrowed by Jagan’s troopers, not so much to assert identity as to promote the mythology of YSR, a mythology much-fortified by martyrdom.
YS Rajasekhara Reddy headed the most resolutely poplulist
regime in the history of Andhra Pradesh. He had a breezy attitude to governance: spend the money. The people loved it: he gave them free healthcare, paid their children’s school fees, and sent a pension to old people. He didn’t send you a power bill, and he gave loans at 25 paise interest. Contractors and pairavikars (loosely, lobbyists) loved him just as much: he took up huge projects with budgets running to thousands of crores. Even 10 per cent of the take was a lot. And the rules were easy.
The people funding the statuary are men who were brought into politics — and perhaps wealth — by the YSR regime, people who profited from the opportunities around. Many are elected reps in the local councils, the Assembly or even the ministry. It is they who are the advance parties in Jagan’s Odarpu Yatra, handing out wads of cash for a fibre glass statue and lunch packets to the cheerleaders. As a farmer in Ravulapalem said, “Where else do you think the money is coming from? Which farmer has money to throw on a statue?’’
For some of the funders, the statues are a way of thanksgiving. MV Padmavathi, chairperson of the Srikakulam municipality, sanctioned Rs 5 lakh for a bronze statue of YSR. It was justified, she said. “When YSR was CM, out municipality was granted a Rs 22 crore drinking water scheme. The statue is meant to record his services to the town.”
Of course there have been stray instances of ordinary people pooling up to participate in the programme. Salana Rajaram, a hawker at a subway near Kotagummam in Rajahmundy town, said he and his fellow petty traders teamed up to raise `75,000 for a YSR statue at the town square. He said everyone came forward to contribute as the former chief minister had extended loans to them.
— Inputs from: PV Krishna Rao
(Vijayawada); Appala Naidu (Srikakulam); S Ramanaiah (Kadapa) and Satyanarayana Reddy (Khammam)
A statue for every budget
For most statue seekers in Andhra Pradesh today, the place to visit is Kothapeta in East Godavari district. That’s where sculptor Devaguptapu Rajkumar Vudayar has his workshop. He is as much a supplier of statues as a sculptor of them, for he produces them as if on an assembly line. Last September, in the days after Y S Rajasekhara Reddy died, his workshop was besieged by statue seekers. Police had to set up a barricade outside him house to keep them at bay.
He has already made nearly 150 statues of YSR including 45 bronze ones. He has orders for several hundred more. One of the orders was from Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy himself. The Kadapa MP visited Vudayar during his Odarpu Yatra the district in July and placed an order for a 26 ft statue for the family estate of Idupulapaya.
Vudayar is amazed by the demand for YSR statuary. He’s never seen anything like it. Apart from the local potentates who want to commission a statue for thanksgiving’s sake a lot of orders come from women members of thrift groups. He says he is planning to make low-cost cement statues to make the poor people happy.
Vudayar works with a variety of materials: fibre glass-reinforced polymer, bronze, concrete, plaster of paris, even wax. The price range of his statues starts from Rs 15,000 to more than Rs 10 lakh depending on the material used.
While the sizes of the statues range from the bonsai statuettes to larger-than-life leviathans, the iconography varies little. Statue seekers prefer imagery of Rajasekhara Reddy waving to the wind and wearing his trademark easy smile.