WARANGAL: On a day when the Srikrishna Committee was in Hyderabad for a farewell round of calls, the TRS Mahagarjana in Hanmakonda worked up a roar loud enough to be heard in the capital.
Attended by several lakhs of people from all over the region, the public meeting served an ultimatum to the Centre to deliver the promise it made on Dec. 9 last year and introduce a bill on separate Telangana in the budget session of Parliament by February of the new year.
Else, the people would launch a satyagraha ruled by uncontrollable passions.
That was the sum of the rhetoric spewed by the entire Telangana pantheon on the dais: TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao, T ideologue Prof K Jayashankar, TJAC convener Prof Kodandaram among others. But between their lines lay a subtle shift of emphasis: be prepared for a long, hard struggle. While overtly they seemed to prime the masses for civil disobedience in the near term, they also seemed reluctant to raise expections of a dream realisation any time soon.
In his 20-minute address, TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao used his rasping wit to show Congress leaders from Telangana as spineless minions who ‘’shiver in their pants’’ to stand up to leaders from the Delhi imperium or even to chief ministers from Andhra and Rayalaseema. The Telugu usage conveys KCR’s drift better: here are chavatalu and daddammalu, mendicants who beg for ministerships.
‘’If these Congress leaders have any guts, they should resign from their posts. Then would the people of Telangana send them back to the legislature with vast majorities,’’ he said. Much of the TRS chief ’s address painted a picture of doomsday should the Srikrishna Committee not deliver what was wanted of it by the people.
If the Centre failed to introduce a T bill in the budget session, a spontaneous satyagraha would be launched, the direction of which was anybody’s guess. It might lead to a paralysis of the administration, he said and urged the people to “aim properly and hit the target.’’ While the Congress and the government won special mention from the TRS boss, the TDP did not go unscathed.
He spoke of its double standards.
Other targets of KCR’s wit were DGP Aravinda Rao and Governor ESL Narasimham, whom he sees as partisan figures ranged against Telangana.
Among the other speakers of the day, activist Swami Agnivesh drew upon the Akbar-Birbal parable of choosing between 100 lashes of the whip or eating 100 pieces of garlic. It was better to endure a period of hardship than buckle unto exploitation, he said. ‘’I come from Srikakulam,’’ he said, to a roar of appreciation. ‘’But I believe in the freedom of the oppressed.’’
While the rhetoric was hot, almost all the speakers nuanced it with caution that there lay a long road ahead. Recent signals -- such as the appointment of a Rayalaseema Reddy as the new chief minister of the state and his stress on respect for law and order and the DGP’s talk of no-kill weaponry for riot control -- have indicated that Delhi is preparing to drag the issue while it calculates the implications to itself. Perhaps with this foreknowledge, KCR seemed to want to shift the onus of leading the coming satyagraha to the Joint Action Committees rather than volunteer himself for it.