REFUTING AN AGITATION:
101 LIES & DUBIOUS ARGUMENTS OF TELANGANA SEPARATISTS - Part 1
Extracts from the book published by Visalandhra Mahasabha
IntroductionThis book is an effort to carefully examine the claims, assertions, and allegations that are made by the
separatists in Telangana. These have gone unexamined for a long time. Therefore, they went unchallenged and unquestioned. Not only those who want the state to be divided believed them to be true but also those who are opposed to the division thought initially that there might be a grain of truth in them. We do not know what the purveyors of these claims and allegations thought about them when they brought them into circulation. Did genuinely think that they were true? Or they just propagated them to serve their separatist agenda?
If they genuinely thought that their allegations and claims were true, this book will give them the
correct picture. They should then have no problem in reexamining their argument and revising their position. But if they deliberately distorted the facts to advance their partisan agenda, this book will expose them and call their bluff. We do hope that they reexamine their position in the light of the facts presented in this work. Victimhood evokes sympathy. Telangana separatists repeated their allegations, claims and assertions in concert. They wrote continuously and propagated tirelessly that Telangana region was discriminated against, exploited, humiliated, and insulted. Those who did not have time or opportunity to verify these claims and allegations took them to be true. And as a consequence they found themselves in sympathy with the separatist cause. This is one of the reasons why in Delhi and elsewhere in the country many columnists, political commentators, and several prominent persons in the media and NGO sectors thought that they were lending their support to a deserving cause. Some political parties and their leaders, despite being unfamiliar with the realities in the state of Andhra Pradesh and in Telangana, also extended their support to what they thought was a genuine cause. But, as it turned out, it was uncritical acceptance of claims, undeserving
sympathy for a cause and unthinking support for a demand. We hope that those who accepted the separatists’ claims at face value will carefully examine and evaluate the narrative that we are presenting in this book.
The separatists began their agitation with the claim that Telangana region has been neglected, that it was backward, and that it was exploited. That was the overture to their concert of propaganda. They were emphatic about their claims as long as those claims went unchallenged. Nalamotu Chakravarthy’s book My Telugu Roots was perhaps the first work that challenged those claims of economic exploitation and backwardness. His book conclusively showed that the region is not backward (no more backward or no less prosperous than any other region in the state) and in fact has registered impressive growth in every sector of economic activity since the formation of Andhra Pradesh state in 1956.
That Chakravarthy hails from Telangana region is significant. Separatists could not tarnish his work as a biased interpretation of data by someone unsympathetic to the interests of his own region. They could not come up with a cogent rebuttal of his argument. Therefore, a cowardly physical assault on Chakravarthy was the only thing that they could do to lend force to their claims. They began to lose their cool as they began to lose their argument.
Justice Srikrishna Committee also rubbished the ‘economic backwardness – exploitation’ argument in its report. This marked the final demise of the economic argument of separatists. The argument that jobs of Telangana people were taken away, that there was theft of irrigation water, and that the successive governments neglected the region, that agreements were violated and other related claims and allegations were proved to be simply incorrect and untrue.
