This is a guest post by R UMA MAHESHWARI

The Andhra Pradesh ministers are fighting like the hooligans they show in Telugu films (one is reminded, in particular, of an old Telugu film aptly named Assembly Rowdy). The fight is all over, and about, investments in Hyderabad and elsewhere. As it is about money. The Parliament fight is with pepper sprays and knives. Back there, on the ground, in tribal villages in AP (yet to be declared as either Seemandhra or Telangana), absolutely unarmed Koyas, Kondareddis, and a few other tribal communities are opposing the construction of the Polavaram dam. And have been marking their protests with dharnas, rasta rooks and burning of effigies of leaders of all political parties. The former have some plum real estate and business interests to protect; the latter have their everything to fight for – homes, land and histories. Not for a while, in the entire debate and fighting over the state of either unification or creation of Telangana have any of these picketers in the Parliament have sought the opinions of the tribal people whose land is today a battleground for investment. One has no qualms of using the peculiar Sanskritic terminology, in the Vedic sense of sacrificial rituals, conducted by the wealthy and upper castes for their benefits, in the name of the ‘common good’. A Former Chief Minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh, YSR, too, used the same Sanskritic term (in spite of his being a Christian) for the irrigation projects (or contractor businesses) he initiated (86 nos.) under jalayagam.  Today the sacrificial ritual continues, and it is a human sacrifice, of more than three hundred thousand tribal people (as it is the sacrifice of animals and birds and every visible or invisible organism), in return for the illusory real-estate-driven world called ‘Greater’ Hyderabad; what if it is going to be a “joint capital for ten years” (and who has seen what the world will look like after ten years, any way? Or what shape it will assume? But these are matters of philosophy and metaphysics, I guess, talking of who knows where we will be, what will be…).

Surely, a few hundred thousand adivasis / tribal communities and a few hundreds of landless Scheduled Castes or fishworkers / fisher communities – even if some of the tribal communities belong to “Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups” (previously called ‘Primitive’) – stand no chance in front of the ‘larger’ idea of Hyderabad, or even the idea of Telangana comprising a region that had learnt to articulate its vision as a modern State quite early on in history. Its history had once included chapters of resistance by the same tribal communities against the despotism of the Nizam at one time under a united and protracted battle. Doesn’t matter if that battle was claimed by several people as ‘theirs’ or disowned by others as something that was not ‘theirs’. One is speaking of the Telangana Armed Struggle.

With the clever game played by the Centre, in league with bigger players in Telangana as well as Andhra and Rayalaseema regions, the difference, so far as the Polavaram dam goes, will be that the marginalised people will be facing displacement not in a joint (ubhaya) Andhra Pradesh state but in two new states – Seemandhra and Telangana. And each state will perhaps now contest over who has a “better compensation package” for ‘their’ own tribals. And who is a more benevolent despot than the other. In the final say, those who will lose and are losing, big time, are the tribal communities. And the dalits and fishermen of the submergence zone of the Polavaram dam project.

I had a sense that Telangana – if at all it would be created – would happen once the Polavaram dam on Godavari river has been built. My logic at that point was very simple. As I have written, and said elsewhere, the so-called ‘multi-purpose’ project has, in deeper senses, a singular purpose, and which is, feeding globalised industrial conglomerates with water for purposes which may be multiple at some future time, including a new kind of imperialistic expansion from the coastal zones of the world. The so-called Indira Sagar multi-purpose project was never ever about providing irrigation water to ‘water-starved’ fields of even coastal Andhra, leave alone Telangana farmers. For, you cannot have Memorandums of Agreement (agreements are never the same as ‘understanding’ and very subtly the corporate world has altered terminologies: agreement gives a certain ‘handshake’ a sort of official stamp without possibilities of retrieval, whereas ‘understanding’ MoU, had a more liberal kind of sense, or so I feel) , as did the Indian state and the government of Andhra Pradesh with several MNCs who are part of the APPCPIR (Andhra Pradesh Petroleum and Petrochemical Investment Region). According to the official website of the APPCPIR, “an investment of $ 3.95 billion is being made for external infrastructure of PCPIR in Andhra Pradesh. The investments are being made by the State Government of Andhra Pradesh, the Central Government of India and private players…The central government’s assistance pertains mainly to upgradation of National Highways, improvement to link roads, airports, rail links etc.” It also mentions the “Major Investors apart from Anchor Industries”, which are Reliance, Eisai, Continental Carbon, Velankani, RCL, Naturol, ISPRL, SNF India, Air Liquide, Baker Hughes, Biocon, Phormozell.”  There is also a supplementary facet to this region, which is in the nature of a structure called the Visakhapatnam Industrial Water Supply Project (commissioned in 2004), which is called “A first-of-its-kind dedicated Industrial Water Sector Project in the State of Andhra Pradesh.” Since several “mega-infrastructure projects” are coming up in the “near vicinity (of Visakhapatnam), viz; APSEZ, Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma City, NTPC, Brandix, Gangavaram Port, among others…a major requirement for this development is availability of reliable source of water supply…VIWSCO is conceived to cater to this felt need.”  It will provide “365 days assured industrial water supply” to all these.  Where will the water come from? From the “Yeleru Left Main Canal from Yeleru Reservoir (385 MLD); Pipeline from Godavari (385 MLD); Samalkota Canal from Godavari (220 MLD); Polavaram Left Main Canal, which is under execution (1848 MLD).” (Source: http://www.appcpir.com) [See mine in The Hindu, dated 5^th October 2013]

In the entire discourse on Telangana-Seemandhra (in fact Rayalaseema was also an incidental inclusion, otherwise, had there been a separate sustained agitation there for articulation of statehood, we would be talking Rayalaseema as a separate entity, not Seemandhra as it has come to be known) there has been no consultation of tribal communities of either sides; in fact and indeed there was no discussion on the state of tribal communities in either of the regions or states in their claims and counter claims. So, it comes as no surprise that the entire submergence zone of Polavaram dam becomes, overnight, a part of Seemandhra State to which none of the communities owe any moral or cultural allegiance. Leave alone, any kind of historical affinity. If the history of the tribal communities were to be written in all sincerity, one would actually find several instances of resistance to the very idea of state and rule that unfortunately the Indian state has followed since the time of independence: in a very colonial language that either looks at them as beneficiaries in need of constant sops from above, or as non-entities in the great development debates happening each day on television and in the Parliament in non-tribal (even non tribal-oriented) tone and tenor and language. Tribal people – as both activists and politicians of this state would believe – cannot understand ‘money’ nor ‘power’ and hence either need to be looked after permanently or needn’t be consulted at all in any of the meetings or discussions; even those that actually are about their displacement!

Displaced, they will be. Submerged, their villages will be. Compensated they might be – after all, companies that can invest $ 3.95 billion for an entire stretch of the coast, can surely throw some pennies for 150 sq.ft of house sites for 300,000 of the indigenous communities that perhaps taught this side of the world the art of growing rain-fed paddy in a certain time of history called the new stone age; or a thing or two about conserving what is now called “prime” forests –  which in today’s government jingo can become a “National Park” and yet be sacrificed (with species that may be termed “Rare”, or “Endangered” and may perhaps belong to the Schedule I of the Wildlife Act on paper but may still not have the security of life and living) were they to be battling against a rich industrialist throwing wads of currency for her or his private profit). Irreversible ecological damages do not count in today’s language of mercantile global profiteering.

So, welcome to a new Telangana and a new Seemandhra sans the tribal communities. The politicians today take part in the greatest trade-off (in modern terms) and the biggest yagnas (in ancient Sanskritic terms) of all times in post-independence India – 276 villages are being readied once again to go under water for a project whose irreversible adverse ecological, human impacts mean nothing to people battling for cities and structures aping a world that had forgotten its own native tribal communities centuries ago in the race for hegemony built of colour and culture and politics.

The question was not of the displaced but of which ‘state’ they were parts of.

The tribal people have their own ideas of region, and their boundaries and borders, but these ideas have never been part of Indian mainstream politics. They have always been subsumed under concepts supposed to reflect the modernity of Indian democracy and hence become part of the linguistic states they may never have been part of in early periods of Indian history.

The game plan of the Central Congress government has come from the pages of craftiness that the Brahmin in Kautilya displayed – it has managed to forge new friendships across the new states of Seemandhra and Telangana for the price of a population not too significant to cry over. At the other end, pre-empting a protracted court battle over the loss of more number of villages of one State due to the construction of the dam in another State, the centre has decided to carve out an entirely new historical entity, the submergence region, as a part of Seemandhra. So the submergence villages will be the ‘responsibility’ of this state entirely and the Polavaram project can go on, unopposed. The Congress government at the centre has also cleverly done this to break any resistance on part of the tribal groups who were beginning to align themselves to the Telangana statehood  discourse and have just about resumed protests against the dam within the same discourse – especially the villages in Khammam district of Telangana, including Bhadrachalam. By the way, a historical truth about the Bhadrachalam temple – it was built by a (clever) brahmin, in charge of the treasury, called Ramadasu, but legend has it that he was imprisoned for his wrongful doings at the Golconda fort. Legend also has it that Rama, Lakshamana and Sita appeared in the dream of the Muslim sultan, Abul Hasan, and asked him to release Ramadasu. The tall and short of it is that the temple at Bhadrachalam was built by the Muslim sultan of Golconda with state money. Over the years, this part of Muslim history and this part of Golconda history has more or less been wiped out of the temple premises, with whitewashing (literally) that has taken place over the years. One wonders what remains of the oral legend – the benevolence of a Muslim sultan of Golconda or the devotion of a Brahmin. History of the future time will be written depending on which of these narratives prevails.

What about the demands for fresh allocations of Godavari (primarily) and Krishna? I quote from my article (The Hindu, 5^th October’13) – “Mr. Ramaswamy Iyer (to a query I posed him) informed that “Once the new State is fully, constitutionally, established, it can certainly ask the Central Government to set up a Tribunal under the ISWD Act. The Central Government has a year to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement, but if that fails it will have to set up a Tribunal. The Centre could not suo motu set up a tribunal under the ISWD Act. 1956…There must be a dispute between two States before one State invokes the ISWD Act. The mere fact of division of AP into two States does not create a dispute. The erstwhile AP’s share of the waters of the Godavari will first have to be allocated to the two new States. In the case of Punjab and Haryana, following the Punjab State Reorganisation Act, the Government of India issued a notification allocating the erstwhile Punjab’s share of Ravi-Beas waters to the new States. I don’t know what the Government of India plans to do in the present case.”

The Polavaram dam debate, I hope, is still not over yet, for, even if the TRS and other Telangana State aspirants among political rulers have sacrificed the rights and identities in one go of the entire submergence zone residents in return for the new state (if they have), they cannot yet let go of the shares of Godavari and Krishna river waters. For, even their political futures in entire Telangana depend on the river discourse.

Meanwhile, I get news that some tribal communities from have come together to protest the decision with burning of the flags and flexi-cards with photographs of political leaders of all the main political parties in the entire debate (including, but not just, TRS and Congress), appropriately, at the Ambedkar Centre in Bhadrachalam!

 [The author is an independent journalist-scholar from Hyderabad.]