The Wedge

How KCR became the face of the Telangana

movement
By PRAVEEN DONTHI | 1 April 2014
|ONE|

ON 20 FEBRUARY, as the day grew colder and darkness fell, around forty
people huddled around two television sets at 23 Tughlaq Road, the central
Delhi residence of Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Raobetter known as KCRa
member of parliament and the founder-president of the Telangana Rashtra
Samithi party. Most people wore woollens they had bought cheaply in local
markets to beat the persistent chill. At 8.05 pm, the deputy chairman of the
Rajya Sabha appeared on the Telugu news channels they were watching. He
announced the passage of the Telangana bill, which paves the way for the
bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh into two parts: Seemandhra to the south and,
to the north, Telanganaa landlocked region bordered by Maharashtra,
Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Karnatakaand now Indias twenty-ninth state.
A cheer went up, and people ran out into the garden to smear each other
with pink gulaaltheTRS party colour. Within a few minutes, the thick smoke
of fireworks had engulfed the premises, and charred paper floated
everywhere. The euphoric crowdparty workers, activists and other
supportersswelled to a hundred. They lifted TRS leaders on their shoulders
and chanted, Galli mein bolo, Dilli mein bolo, Jai Telangana, Jai Telangana.
Say it in the street, say it in Delhihail Telangana.
In the commotion, reporters interviewed any TRS leaders they could find.
One desperate Telugu journalist thrust a mike at KCRs ten-year-old
grandson, who was happily throwing gulaal. KCR is the Telangana tiger.
Everything has happened because of him, the boy said, exuding a
confidence very like his grandfathers. Since I have been this smallhe
gestured with his handI knew Telangana would come.
In twenty minutes, KCR, in a teal blue Nehru suit, arrived from parliament in
a white Innova with his lucky number, 6666, on its license plate. He flashed
two thumbs up, and people went wild, shouting and pushing to get closer to
him as he went into the house. He came out again in half an hour, carrying
the text of a speech written by his close associate, the poet and singer
Desapati Srinivas. The crowd fell silent, except for one supporter who
mistimed his shout of Telangana Gandhi, KCR ki jaiHail KCR, the Gandhi
of Telanganaand was rebuked by KCR himself.
With senior TRS leaders by his side, and his grandson nearby, KCR began to
read out a list of acknowledgments. He thanked the politicians who had
supported the bill; his unofficial panel of expert advisors; the people of his
constituency, Mahabubnagar; and the TRS leaders who had, over the years,

resigned in solidarity from positions in the Andhra Pradesh assembly and

council, and the parliament, whenever he had asked them to do so. He also
acknowledged his debt to the late Kothapalli Jayashankar, an economics
professor and the revered ideologue of Telangana, who had guided him ever
since he took up the movement almost fifteen years ago.
First and foremost, however, he thanked the Congress president, whose
party had steamrolled the fierce opposition and pushed the Telangana bill
through both houses of parliament. Shrimati Sonia Gandhi is responsible for
the victory, KCR told the crowd. Without her intervention and strong
commitment towards the issue it wouldnt have been possible. I thank her
from the bottom of my heart on behalf of the four crore people of
Telangana.
Now that statehood had been granted, the question on everyones mind was
whether KCR would, in return, keep a 2012 promise to merge the TRS with
the Congress. But he was in no hurry to answer. Now we have achieved the
state, ahead is reconstruction, he announced grandly. There are lots of
things to do. I will give out the details in the future.
Two weeks lateran eternity in electoral politicsKCR addressed the media
at Telangana Bhavan, the TRS party office in Hyderabad. He simply ruled out
the prospect of a merger with the Congress and, in a complete turnaround
from his posture of gratitude in Delhi, he lashed out at the party for ignoring
TRS demands at the time of bifurcation. If the Congress is in a position to
form the government tomorrow we might support them, he said. If
anybody wants to discuss alliances, I have appointed a committee. They will
take a call.
He added, We will support whichever formation comes to power at the
centre so that maximum benefit can be extracted.
A journalist asked whether the Congress or the TRS would get the credit for
forming Telangana. Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and other Indians fought with
the British and got independence, KCR shot back. Did people go and
garland Queen Elizabeth? The journalists laughed.
KCR told the press that the TRS would contest enough seats to be able to
form our own government in the new state. All the surveys, he reminded
them, were giving the TRS fourteen Lok Sabha seats as well. What
Telangana needs today is political self-determination, he said. The people
of Telangana asked me, How can you merge the party now? Telangana shall
have its own voice.
Someone asked KCR what his own role in the government of the new state
would be. He was quick to answer: Of course, I will play the lead role
definitely. I was the vanguard of the movement. I will be the vanguard of
reconstruction of Telangana. Why not?

THE IDEA OF A SEPARATE TELANGANA STATE has emerged and receded

from Indias political landscape many times since independence, like a
subterranean stream subject to tectonic shifts of power and influence.
Following the constitution of the States Reorganisation Commission, Andhra
Pradesh was the first state to be created on a linguistic basis, in 1956. Its
formation required an uneasy compromise between the elites of three
regionslandlocked but riverine Telangana, arid Rayalaseema, and the
Coastal Andhra regionand had its sceptics from the start. Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru called the merger imperialist. When it went through, he
assured people that it was a marriage with a provision for divorce.
Over time, Andhra Pradeshs two dominant caste groups each came to
control a political party. The Kammas, with roots in the four districts of the
Andhra delta, took over the Telugu Desam Party, formed in 1982. The
Reddys, largely located in Rayalaseema and parts of Telangana, dominated
the states Congress party, and generally looked out for interests that were
common to the two regions. But 90 percent of Telanganas population
consists of backward castes, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other
minorities; when Andhra Pradesh was formed, safeguards had been put in
place to protect this relatively disadvantaged populationbut they were
never enforced.
On this uneven foundation, future inequities piled up, deepening the divide
between the region and its neighbours. In terms of economic and social
advancement, Telangana remained relatively stagnant over the years: KCR
sometimes lists the employment options in Telangana as Bombai, Dubai,
Boggu baiBombay, Dubai, or the coalmine.
The idea of a Telangana separate from other Telugu-speaking regions had
existed since almost the very beginning of Andhra Pradesh, gathering in
political and cultural force over time. In Telangana-Andhra: Castes, Regions
and Politics in Andhra Pradesh, activist Inukonda Thirumali wrote:
Telangana developed into a movement for a separate state as a solution
to the political crisis and for the democratic space of the subordinate
classes. Suppressed by the dominance of the Rayalaseema and Coastal
Andhra regionsknown collectively as Seemandhrathis movement had
periods of apparent dormancy, but was kept alive and nourished by the
writings of Telanganas left-wing intellectuals, the poetry of its singers, and
by the blood of its supporters as it erupted, from time to time, into violent
protest.
A politician or party would take up the cause now and again, but never in a
sustained way until the 1990s, when the rise of regional parties and coalition
governments created new intersections between popular movements and
politics throughout India, including in Telangana. KCR, a four-time state
assembly member who worked his way up from grassroots organiser to a
cabinet minister, recognised the potential in building a political platform on
the desire for a separate Telangana. In the separatist movement, he saw an

opportunity to skew the balance of power in Andhra Pradesh away from the
status quo of the Congress and the ruling Telugu Desam Party, of which he
was a member, and to draw together diverse groups who would help to
achieve his goal. The Telangana movement has always drawn its supporters
from traditionally disadvantaged social groups and castes, who were later left
behind in the race for development after Indias economic liberalisation. From
these groups, KCR might have seen a way to build himself a base of voters.
In KCR, the movement gained a shrewd politician and a skilful orator. He has
equal command over the nuances of the Telangana dialect and the scholarly
theories of the experts he surrounds himself with. The economist
Jayashankar, in particular, helped him frame a forceful argument for the
bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, backed with facts and figures about resourcesharing and job protection. But it was KCR who boiled that down to a simple,
alliterative demand: neellu, nidhulu, niyamakaluwater, resources, and
appointments.
In Telugu films, villains and comedians often speak the Telangana dialect.
KCR shares the rough poetry of this guild. His language, which can be
downright abusive, has been called unparliamentary, and his behaviour,
uncouth. Transgression became a part of his signature styleperhaps a
calculated strategy to garner media coverage in a state where the television
news channels are almost entirely dominated by Seemandhra interests.
The media revelled in KCRs quirks. I dont think any leaders personal
habits have been dissected as much as KCRs, his son, K Taraka Rama Rao,
who is also an MLA, told me. Commentators and opponents criticise KCRs
habit of waking up late, and add fuel to the perception that he is a chronic
alcoholic. In 2013, he categorically stated that he had quit drinking in an
interview on the Telugu show Open Heart. To an extent, KCR appears not to
mind the criticism, but of late, he has learned the value of occasionally
correcting himself when chastened by an exacting media.
As the Telangana movements political face, KCRwho is a velama, an upper
castehas faced criticism for his lack of engagement with the complexities of
caste in the region. When some of KCRs critics asked Jayashankar, himself
from a backward caste, why he supported a velama dora (velama lord), he
said Show me the alternative. Perhaps to counter such criticism, KCR has
often stressed his desire to install a Dalit chief minister in Telangana
(sometimes backed up by his stated dream of having a Muslim deputy chief
minister).
The precondition for that promisethe creation of Telanganahas now been
fulfilled. But it seems unlikely that KCR could resist trying to become the
new states first chief minister himself. After thirty years, we found a
leader, Jayashankar said, in a book of interviews compiled after his death.
Is he perfect? May be not. Perfection exists only in the dictionary.

|TWO|
I MET KASOJI VENKATA CHARI on a January evening, in a caf
overlooking the busy LB Nagar crossing in Hyderabad. It was there, four
years ago, that Venkata Charis son Srikant had doused himself in gasoline,
struck a match and run, burning and screaming Jai Telangana, right up to
the Ambedkar statue at the crossroad, where he collapsed at its bronzepainted feet. He died in a hospital three days later. At the same time, in
another hospital across town, KCR was carrying on a fast unto death for
Telangana.
Chari, a carpenter, told me that his son had been a physiotherapy student
and a member of the TRS student wing; his mobile phone wallpaper was a
photo of KCR. After his death, the family had dedicated themselves to the
movement, and tried to spread the word that suicide is not a solution.
Popular belief in Telangana holds that 1,000 people have sacrificed their lives
for the cause. One group, the Telangana Development Forum, has a booklet
that lists over 900 such individuals.
My son used to say that the Telangana formation would be the real dawn,
Chari said. Then he looked at me and asked, One Potti Sriramulu died and
the government granted Andhra state. But there is no response even after so
many youth have died here. Why?
The Telugu activist Potti Sriramulu died in 1952, while fasting to urge the
central government to create a separate state of all the Telugu-speaking
regionsnamely Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhraof the Madras
Presidency. Following Sriramulus death and the mass protests that surged in
its wake, the Jawaharlal Nehru government acquiesced, and the Andhra state
came into being. But its new political parties soon began to demand a
mergerciting a common languagewith the nine Telugu-speaking districts
of Hyderabad state, whose river resources and rich capital city, Hyderabad,
they coveted.
Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956, out of two regions with markedly
different histories and challenges. Telangana, which had been part of the
princely state of Hyderabad, and had been administered by the Nizam, was
still mired in a feudal economy. Andhra, formerly administered by the British,
had modern infrastructure such as dams and new irrigation technologies, and
high literacy levels.
A Gentlemans Agreement signed by both sides was meant to safeguard
Telanganas economy and the regions share in government representation;
but from the very beginning, rich peasants from Andhra invested and settled
in the irrigated areas of Telangana, introducing cash crops and inflating the
price of land. In Hyderabad, people grew angry that ghair-mulkis, or nonlocals, began to be hired for jobs reserved for mulkis, or locals.

The first big protest against the violation of these safeguards was a student
movement that began in 1968. It became an agitation for a separate state,
continuing for several months and peaking in the summer of 1969, despite a
state crackdown and the loss of about 370 lives. That summer, the
breakaway Congressman Marri Chenna Reddy became the leader of the
Telangana Praja Samithithe first party founded to lead the agitation. Its
candidates contested the fifth Lok Sabha elections in 1971 and won ten out
of fourteen seats in Telangana. But Reddy soon merged his party with the
Congress. Many disillusioned young agitators from his once-loyal base joined
another movement, the Naxalite rebellion, which was taking root in the state
around the same time.
For almost three decades after Marri Chenna Reddys attempt, the Telangana
movement went into remission. In the meantime, in addition to the
acquisition of Telanganas rural land by wealthy Seemandhra farmers
ongoing since the days of the Nizamthe migration of ghair-mulkis to
Hyderabad increased dramatically during the IT and real estate booms of the
1990s. The Andhra region had an abundance of engineering and science
colleges, whose students flocked to the emerging technology industry in the
city, nicknamed Cyberabad. It was a population whose aims and ambitions
contrasted sharply with those of the humanities and social science students
from Osmania and Kakatiya universities, who had led the Telangana protests.
Big business in the city, from real estate to cinema, was dominated by, and
geared to further support, the entrepreneurs and politicians of the Andhra
belt.
In 1996, Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda gave the idea of Telangana a new
lease of life by mentioning the possible creation of a new state, Uttarakhand,
in his Independence Day speech. A meeting was organised on 1 November
that year in Warangal, and addressed by ideologues like Jayashankar. A
small hall was booked, but five thousand people attended it to our surprise,
Jayashankar recalled in a published interview. The next day, Andhra Pradesh
chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, of the TDP, warned protestors that he
would quash any efforts to revive the movement. But according to
Jayashankar, His warning not only alerted people but also only further
provoked them. Then there were a series of meetings.
Academics and activists, including some who had been involved in the 1969
agitations, began to organise seminars and publish books on the subject of
Telangana. As calls for new states arose in different parts of the country, the
vision of a separate Telangana flickered back to life. The revived interest in
the movement came from various quarters, including Maoist and Maoistaffiliated groups, who indicated their support for a separate Telangana in
1996. Nandini Sidha Reddy, a poet from KCRs hometown and his friend, told
me that all the initial meetings were hugely successful, though there was no
political support.
In July 1998, the Maoist-backed Telangana Jana Sabha invited Yasin Malik,

the separatist leader of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, to its
inaugural meeting. This caused controversy amongst moderate supporters.
A lot of us who were sceptical stayed away, Sidha Reddy said. They were
committed, but their aggressive participation didnt allow the movement to
pick up with wider peoples participation. The political atmosphere those days
was that of fear. In April 1997, Gaddar, a hugely popular Naxalite poet and
a balladeer of Telangana, survived an assassination attempt by unknown
assailants; a bullet remains lodged in his body. In May 1999, two other
singer-activists, Maroju Veeranna and Belli Lalitha, were murdered; one shot
and the other gruesomely hacked into pieces and thrown into multiple wells.
The perpetrators of these crimes were never found. When I spoke to the
senior TRS leader V Prakash, he voiced the common belief that the
Chandrababu government killed them, because they were spreading the
awareness on Telangana. Naidus suppression of the burgeoning protests
was somewhat successful. By the end of 1999, most of the more radical
organisations had been crushed, and Naidus TDP had been voted back into
power with a sound majority. The TDP MLA from the town of Siddipet, K
Chandrasekhar Rao, won his fourth consecutive assembly election.
BORN IN 1954, KCR was the tenth child of Kalavakuntla Raghava Rao, a
construction contractor from Chintamadaka village, about three hours north
of Hyderabad in northern Telanganas Medak district. KCR earned a BA from
the Government Degree College in Siddipet, Medaks biggest town. His fellow
students, including Sidha Reddy, remember him as someone who was
passionate about literature and politics, participated regularly in college
debates and was crazy about films, even to the extent of wanting to write
scripts. KCR contested his colleges presidential election in 1974, his final
year, but came last. His friends told me he was averse to radical politics. KCR
went to Delhi in 1975 to join Sanjay Gandhis Youth Congress, in the year of
the state-imposed Emergency. He returned to Siddipet in 1980, after
Gandhis death, and ran for another election that he lost, for the post of
chairman of a primary agriculture cooperative society. A turning point came
in 1982, when KCR joined the new TDP, launched by the Telugu film icon and
three-time chief minister of Andhra Pradesh NT Rama Rao, known as NTR.
KCR lost his first MLA election in 1983, from Siddipet, but won the same seat
in the next assembly election, in 1985. He has never lost an election since.
During his first four terms as an MLA, between 1985 and 2001, he cultivated
a close relationship with his constituency and earned a reputation for getting
things done. In Siddipet, I met K Anjaiah, a journalist for the Telugu paper
Andhra Jyothy who knew KCR during his early days as an MLA and remains
close to him. He was accessible, he told me, He remembers everybody by
their names. For people who were used to the Congress culture of invisible
MLAs, this was a refreshing change.
KCRs most significant accomplishment of those days, Anjaiah recalled, was
in 1989, when the central government put forth a scheme to provide safe
water to villages affected by flourosis, a disease caused by high levels of

flouride in the water. There were a couple of [flourosis affected] villages in

our constituency, Anjaiah said. Slightly sheepishly, he explained that KCR
inflated the number in order to extend the benefits of the scheme to other
villages with water shortages. That brought him unflinching loyalty, he
said.
Chandrababu Naidu, who took over as chief minister in 1996, made KCR his
transport minister. In that role, KCRs work continued in the same vein. His
dream, Anjaiah told me, was to build a thirty-five-acre model village in his
constituency, but it never materialised for lack of support. But another
project that Anjaiah described demonstrated KCRs skills of persuasion. The
government wanted to build a four-kilometre road through some farmland
just southwest of Siddipet. In just three months, KCR convinced a hundred
people to donate their land for free, and to help build the road under the
states Janmabhoomi scheme, which involved volunteers in the
implementation of welfare schemes. He convinced them the price of their
land would go up if there was a road nearby, Anjaiah said. After it was
built, there were demands for three more such roads. KCRs graphic recall of
the topography of his constituency helped, Anjaiah said. This knowledge
would eventually extend to the entire region. A Sridhar, a Telangana activist
and close associate of KCR, told me, When KCR goes to a village for a
meeting, he always enquires about their village pond or refers to their hill or
their temple. He has an intimate memory of Telanganas geography.
But relations with the TDP would derail following the 1999 election. During
Naidus second term as chief minister, he appointed KCR deputy speaker in
the Vidhan Sabha. This came as a huge affront; KCR had expected to be
included in the state cabinet. He had been a loyal friend, and had supported
Naidu through his takeover of the TDP from NTR. A desire for vengeance
drove KCR to quit the TDP, and Telangana became his chosen weapon for
retribution.
People may say [KCRs defection from TDP] was about not getting a
ministry, KCRs daughter K Kavitha, who runs a Telangana cultural
organisation, told me. But the truth is, he was shocked that Naidu, whom he
trusted so much, didnt include him in his cabinet. It was the betrayal. After
that, all he wanted was vengeance. He wanted to crush Naidu.
The first signs of rebellion appeared in May 2000. Naidu had just introduced
a steep hike in power tariffsin line with an economic project devised by the
World Bankduring a period of drought in the state. The chief ministers
Congress and Left opponents accused him of dictatorial decision-making.
KCR, too, trained his guns on his chief. He fired his first salvo at Naidu in an
open letter, in which he argued that the hike would hit Telangana farmers
hardest as they had no irrigation infrastructure and relied on motors to pump
ground water.
Quietly, KCR started laying the foundation for a new party, with the sole aim

of separate statehood for Telangana. As part of his research, he had long

conversations with Gade Innaiah, a former Naxal insurgent who was involved
in the Telangana movement and was looking for a politician to support the
cause. The discussions between the two men went on for months, Innaiah
told me in a phone interview. He said he had imposed a ban on KCRs
drinking alcohol as a condition for his help.
He discusses everything threadbare and takes out all the information you
have, Innaiah said. We spent thousands of hours discussing various aspects
of the movement. Not a day went by without us watching both the sun and
the moon rise together. He was very frustrated, and he realised that this
cause would help him. Their friendship would sour when Innaiah quit the
TRS within a year of its formation, alleging that the partys top leadership
engaged in purely unilateral decision-making. He took some ninety party
members with him.
Then, in October 2000, KCR met Jayashankar, the man who would support
and guide him until the latter's death in 2011. Born in 1934, Jayashankar
had seen Telangana through its various phases and had a broad perspective
on the movement. More than ideology, the ideal is important and the aim,
he said in a published interview. That is why the RSS says we want
Telangana and so does the Radical Students Union. Both should come
together for the movement. KCR, who often says I will even kiss a
caterpillar for Telangana, incorporated the lesson into his quest for
statehood. He welcomed both the ultra left and the ultra right into his camp,
and eventually brought a motley coalition together under the umbrella of the
Telangana Joint Action Committee.
|THREE|
WHEN HE GAVE UP A CAREER in the TDP and started the TRS, KCR was
forty-seven years old. The TDP was the second-largest party in the National
Democratic Alliance at the centre; the TRS was founded to fight for a regional
goal that seemed almost unachievable at the time. But by November 2000,
the creation of Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh had given the
Telangana movement a certain urgency. By the end of the year, KCR had a
party name, a flag and a strategy in place, but decided to wait for the dates
of the local body elections to be announced before launching the party. The
Supreme Court announced local elections and the inaguration of the
Telangana Rashtra Samithi went off without a hitch on 27 April 2001.
KCR was reluctant to resign, Innaiah told me. But we didnt relent, and
forced him to resign the posts of deputy speaker and MLA before he
announced the new party. Just before the launch of the TRS, KCR called up
his son and daughter, who were in the United States. I think this is my
calling and I am going after it, he told his son, KTR, who told me, I was
among the 99 percent of sceptics. KCRs conversation with his daughter was
more emotional. I dont know what the future is going to be. Your marriage

is my only responsibility; hopefully I will be able to fulfil it in a decent

manner. Otherwise, please understand, he said, Kavitha recalled.
Unlike his political opponents, who were backed by the landed Reddy and
Kamma entrepreneurs of Seemandhra, KCR had no big business backing;
financing the party was a big challenge. Prakash, a founding member of TRS,
told me that KCR sold some of his land on the outskirts of Hyderabad. He
bought a house befitting a party chief in the citys upmarket Banjara Hills
area, and used the rest of the money to campaign.
The Samithis first public meeting, titled simha garjana (lions roar), was held
on 17 May 2001, in Karimnagar in northern Telangana, where the separatist
sentiment is strong. Against the backdrop of the failure of the Maoist-backed
attempt at reviving Telangana two years ago, KCR announced that the TRS
would lead the movement for a separate state without shedding a drop of
blood. KCRs speech at the meeting would become a template of sorts. He
flogged the government for failing Telanganas farmers, weavers and
adivasis. He brought up one of his favourite examples of discrimination
between the two regions: how the TDP had used its influence at the centre to
prevent the closure of a steel plant at Visakhapatnam, but wouldnt extend
the same effort for the Fertilizer Corporation plant in Ramagundam, in the
Karimnagar district. To counter the popular belief that politicians take up
Telangana as a last-ditch effort to boost dwindling careers, he told the
crowd: If any one of us strays from the path of achieving a separate
Telangana, stone us to death. KCR challenged Naidu to stand against him in
the Siddipet by-election (necessitated by his own resignation). He promised
to take the fight all the way to the capital. Politics is the only way to achieve
Telangana, he said. We will create a political compulsion for Delhi to form
Telangana.
First, however, TRS had to contest the local body elections, which usually go
in favour of the ruling party. In the beginning, no one knew what to make of
a politician who assumed the mantle of a separatist leader just because he
had been sidelined by his party. KCR did not always seem to know what was
expected of him as a leader, either. He is not a mechanical person,
Desapati Srinivas told me. He is emotional and does what he likes. If he
likes a person, he will sit with the lowest worker of the party and the biggest
MLAs will have to wait. He abhors the formality of doing certain things a
politician is expected to do. He wouldnt, for instance, do the mandatory flaghoisting on Independence Day. Even the smallest of things ended up hurting
his image.
During the campaign, KCR played to his strengthhis ability to connect with
people on the groundto overcome doubts that he was a charlatan. He
decided to travel all over Telangana in a helicopter. Mao always said that we
should start with a bang to attract peoples attention, Innaiah said, and
then get them to talk about it, and win their confidence. So we borrowed the
money for a helicopter. The gimmick captured the public imagination; it also

allowed KCR to cover a lot of groundalmost eighty mandals (tehsils). If he

has hundred rupees, he makes it look like a thousand, Kavitha told me.
In June, just two months after its inception, armed with little more than
KCRs wits and a ragtag group of intellectuals and activists, the TRS won the
civic polls, gaining eighty-seven zilla parishad territorial constituencies,
ninety-two mandal parishad Territorial Constituencies, and the two zilla
parishads of Karimnagar and Nizamabad, bagging 19.27 percent of votes
polled. Most of the wins came in the northern districts of Telangana
Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Warangal and Medakwhere Peoples War, a
prominent Naxal outfit, was and continues to be considerably influential.
Simmering with anger over the repression they had faced under Naidu, the
Naxals were interested in strategically supporting and using the TRS to hit
back at the chief minister. Some members from its lower rungs joined the
TRS for asylum.
Srinivas described how TRSs success gave the Telangana movement greater
legitimacy in the political mainstream. With the coming of TRS, there was
social freedom to talk about Telangana openly. Earlier it was a crime. So we
thought we should support and strengthen TRS, he said. The initial success
drew even more support for TRS from various quarters. Aelay Narendra, a
BJP MP and RSS member who quit his party to found the separatist
Telangana Sadhana Samithi, merged his party with TRS within the year. As
Jayashankar had said, the Telangana movement attracted support from a
wide political spectrum. With the civic poll victories, the TRS could now be
seen as the representative of Telangana.
In the Siddipet by-election, KCR was re-elected to the Vidhan Sabha, and
became the first TRS MLA. He returned to the state assembly in September
2001, and began to use it as a platform to attack Naidu. I will hire a
helicopter with my own money, he said. Lets take journalists and fly over
Telangana. If you can show them the fields being irrigated in lakhs of acres
as you claim, I will jump from there. But if you cant show it, will you jump?
The house erupted in laughter. Earlier, a state assembly speaker had banned
the use of the word Telangana, encouraging MLAs to replace it with
backward area. But with KCRs win, all the rules had changed.
IN NOVEMBER 2003, Naidu dissolved the state assembly after his convoy
was blown up by Naxals. He pushed for early elections, possibly looking for
sympathy votes, but the polls were scheduled to be held simultaneously with
the Lok Sabha elections in April 2004. The Congress party, desperate for a
comeback, listed peace talks with Naxals in its manifesto to garner their
support. But the issue of Telangana had become even more divisive, and
here, through a mix of grandstanding in public and micro-management
behind the scenes, KCR ensured that the repercussions of the Telangana
movement were felt nationally.
As early as August 2000, forty-one Congress legislators from Telangana had

appealed to the high command to support statehood. The Congress working

committee, in turn, sent a resolution to Home Minister LK Advani, asking him
to constitute a second State Reorganisation Committee. He rejected the
request, as Naidu was a crucial ally to the NDA. The state BJP unit, which
had resolved in favour of bifurcation in 1998, was also snubbed. But by
2003, KCR succeeded in making Telangana a thorn in the flesh of every party
in Andhra Pradesh. The TDPBJP alliance which led the NDA seemed
unshakeable, and it was the Congress leaders from Telangana who pushed
hard for their party to tie up with the TRS for the upcoming Lok Sabha
elections in 2004.
The Andhra Pradesh Congress leader YS Rajasekhara Reddy was lukewarm to
the idea, but the party high command pushed him to deal with KCR. The
alliance negotiations were conducted, for the Congresss part, by senior
leader Pranab Mukherjee, and All-India Congress Committee in-charge for
Andhra Pradesh, Ghulam Nabi Azad. For the TRS, KCR bargained hard,
demanding that the Congress commit to a position on Telangana. The
Congress, fearing a rebellion from the leaders of Andhra and Rayalaseema,
only promised a Second Reorganisation Commission to look into the issue. It
was enough for KCR, who readily accepted the support.
The tenuous CongressTRS partnership in the state was joined by the Left
parties. KCR managed to bargain for six out of seventeen Lok Sabha seats
and forty-two out of 107 Assembly seats. (He is a superstitious man: six was
his lucky number and four plus two totalled to six). The partnership turned
out to be very successful indeed (if ultimately ill-fated). In its first big
election outing, TRS won twenty-six assembly seats, and a remarkable five
out of the six Lok Sabha seats it contested in Telangana, equalling the TDPs
tally (the latter fought in thirty-three seats). KCR and Aelay Narendra
became union ministers in the United Progressive Alliance. KCR was given
the shipping ministry, but he gave it up in two days, reportedly because the
DMK, another UPA ally, wanted it. He eventually became union labour
minister. Six TRS legislators found place in the state cabinet, headed by YSR.
The CongressTRSLeft alliance had handed the TDP its worst defeat ever.
As this jockeying for power in Delhi got underway, KCR came under intense
pressure from his supporters, some of whom criticised him for keeping
Telangana on the backburner. As union minister, KCR had a delicate balance
to maintain. He once took a delegation of backward caste Telangana MLAs to
meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about a petition related to
reservations, but told the media outside that the meeting was a discussion
about Telangana. Singhs media advisor at the time, Sanjaya Baru, later told
a television channel that Telangana was not discussed at all. (Baru, who hails
from Hyderabad, has always openly opposed the bifurcation.) KCR did push
for an inclusion in the UPAs Common Minimum Programme, which stated
that the government would consider the demand for the formation of a
Telangana State at an appropriate time after due consultations and
consensus, without committing to a timeframe. The Indian president, APJ

Abdul Kalam, addressed the issue in an address to parliament, giving the

TRS further reason for hope.
However the Andhra Pradesh Congresss much-vaunted peace talks with the
Naxals were about to shatter these expectations. In October 2004, top
Maoist leaders came out of hiding for the first time, to meet with the YSR
government. When the talks ultimately failed, it was TRS members, caught
between allies, who became collateral damage in the ensuing violence.
Among the casualties were two grassroots leaders, one of them a former
Naxal, murdered for ignoring a warning to quit the TRS.
The killings terrified the rank and file. On 1 July 2005, the state police killed
Riyaz Khan, a senior Maoist member, in a fake encounter. KCR had no choice
but to ask all his partys ministers and legislators to resign, or risk completely
losing credibility with the Maoists, historically crucial supporters of the
Telangana cause. The TRS leaders obliged, resigning three days later and
bringing the uneasy twelve-month alliance with the Congress to an end in
July 2005. The exception, however, was KCR, who explained that he would
not quit because he was needed to campaign for statehood at the centre.
We have confidence in the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and in the UPA to
deliver a separate Telangana, he said.
However, in little over a year, KCR would be forced to resign to rescue his
party at its lowest ebb. To blunt the criticism that the TRS had slackened its
efforts, the party began to resort to desperate damage control. It organised
a public meeting on 18 July 2005 in Warangal, inviting the veteran
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar to show off KCRs growing
influence at the centre. On A Narendras advice, TRS briefly tried to launch
an RSS-style organisation called the Telangana Jagarana Sena, an outfit with
lathi-wielding cadres, but the initiative caught considerable flak, particularly
from leftist Telangana ideologues. Around the same time, the party fared
disastrously in the municipal elections, without allies in the Congress because
of the bad blood.
The TRS remained a one man partyand that man sat in New Delhi, away
from the crisis. A Times of India editorial on 27 September 2005 observed
that No organisational elections were held and in fact no party organisation
was set up to follow up on the success of 2004. There were no party cadre
and worse still, no attempts to build one. By May 2006, ten TRS MLAs
defected to the Congress party.
In 2006, the TRS did ally with the Congress for local body elections, but only
sank furtherthe TDP had made a comeback in the region despite its
opposition to the statehood. To KCR, the choice between home and Delhi
grew stark. In August, he and Narendra resigned as cabinet ministers to
rescue the party, and went on a fast at Delhis Jantar Mantar even before his
resignation was accepted. (It lasted two days before Sharad Pawar cajoled
him to break the fast.) A series of accusations flew between him and the

state Congress following this and, on 23 September 2006, KCR resigned as

an MP.
With a by-election now necessary in KCRs Lok Sabha constituency of
Karimnagar, he did everything he could to frame the contest as a referendum
on Telangana. Let us go to the people on a single point agenda: whether the
people want separate Telangana or not, KCR said. The Congress came out
with guns blazing, as Chief Minister YSR and several other ministers
campaigned for their candidate. KCR said it was a matter of life and death for
Telangana. It certainly was for the Telangana Rashtra Samithi.
In this by-election, KCR won by a margin of more than two lakh votes and
bagged more votes than all the other candidates combined. For the first
time, activists of all hues, including those not necessarily in favour of the
TRS, had come together for a cause. Resignation had proved to be a risky
but ultimately useful strategy, allowing KCR to take the moral high ground. It
made him the face of the Telangana movement. The high drama of the byelection did not guarantee political or electoral security, however. In spite of
what had happened, no effort to build an internal structure followed.
Resigning in the name of Telangana and fighting elections, it became clear,
was a way for the TRSs leaders to give momentum to the party. After just
over a year, when the centre did not address Telangana in the budget
session, KCR asked his sixteen remaining MLAs (ten had since joined the
Congress) and four MPs (Narendra had been sacked after being linked to a
passport scam), to resign. In the ensuing 2008 by-elections, TRS scraped
through, winning seven assembly seats and two Lok Sabha seats. KCRs
margin of victory nosedived to 15,000 votes, and he even tried to resign
from the party.
When the 2009 Lok Sabha elections rolled around, the TRS looked short on
allies. Naidu who was desperate to overthrow YSR, had joined with the Left
parties, the CPI(M) and the CPI, who insisted on inviting the TRS. KCR ended
up joining what became known as the Mahakootami, the Grand Alliance,
against the Congress, in spite of tremendous mistrust between the TRS and
TDP, and furious opposition from the TRSs supporters. The TRS won only ten
out of the forty-five assembly seats it officially contested, and two out of the
nine Lok Sabha seats.
YSR, who came back with a thumping majority, taunted KCR, saying that
Telangana was not the exclusive jagir (land grant) of the TRS: The
Telangana people have made it clear that they are with the Congress, he
crowed. We are ready to take you on any day in the region. Naidu turned
around and blamed the TRS for his loss. Desapati Srinivas told me he
thought the loss came about because KCR had ignored the connect between
the TRS and its strength, the Telangana movement. He thought it was solely
the partys decision, and looked at it from an electoral point of view. Once
again, a political miscalculation had left the movement for Telangana
rudderless.

|FOUR|
IN SEPTEMBER 2009, YSR died in a helicopter crash over the Nallamala
hills, throwing Andhra Pradesh into political turmoil.
His death cast the Andhra Pradesh Congress into disarrayYSRs son,
Jaganmohan Reddy, left the party in a pique, upon being denied his fathers
chief ministerial post. In a stunning reversal of fortune, one of the TRSs
biggest obstacles was gone. Sensing the significance of the moment, and still
smarting from the disgrace of the Lok Sabha election results, KCR
understood that he could no longer afford to be seen as half-hearted on the
issue of statehood.
That October, a Supreme Court ruling provided KCR with the ammunition for
the first round in a more aggressive fight for Telangana. The judgement ruled
that people from outside Telangana (the ghair-mulkis, or settlers) were
allowed to take government jobs in Hyderabad for the first time. KCR
demanded a constitutional amendment to scrap the ruling. His supporters
were sceptical about the standit was a bold move in light of the partys
statebut KCR saw that the issue would have popular appeal. On 16
November, he announced that he would be starting a fast unto death for
Telangana, in Siddipet. Be prepared for either my funeral procession or a
victory rally, he said.
In the days leading up to 29 November, the scheduled day of the fast, there
was much laying of groundwork. Relay hunger strikes were scheduled in
solidarity, to maximise the impact of the fast. KCR had previously been
reluctant to involve students, but now, for the first time, he asked for the
support of all unemployed youth; the students of Osmania University
responded by forming a joint action committee. More uncharacteristically for
the TRS, KCR also called for a jail bharo (fill the jails) movement. The party
spread the slogan KCR chachudo, Telangana vachudo (KCR dies or
Telangana comes) far and wide, and KCR went on every television channel
that would have him in order to hype the fast.
On the designated day, he was arrested on his way to the venue and shifted
to a jail in Khammam, on the border of Telangana, where the TRS had no
presence. KCR resolved to begin his fast in the jail, causing an outpouring of
public support. When Srikant Chari set himself on fire in LB Nagar, the
protests escalated. On the Osmania campus, striking students clashed with
paramilitary forces and were brutally beaten. The entire proceedings were
broadcast live, triggering a wave of sympathy for the movement.
On 20 November, news channels broadcast visuals of KCR drinking juice and
breaking his fast in jail. KTR told me that his father was alone under police
supervision and had been manipulated. The hunger-striking students of
Osmania were infuriated. They took out a symbolic funeral procession,
shouting: Why dont you drink our blood? As the movement threatened to

slip out of the TRSs hands, KCR immediately announced that he was
continuing his fast.
As the movement started to bring together disparate groups in its support,
TRSs control over the protest it had sparked grew nominal. KCR was brought
to NIMS hospital in Hyderabad. Jayashankar stayed with him; his family was
in the next room. There was a severe financial crunch, Kavitha told me.
On the one hand, the movement was picking up, and on the other, various
leaders kept coming to demand money. They would say, We expressed our
support outside, hoping you would fund our protests. A lot of them kept
thinking it was still politics. One leader sat for twenty-four hours and left only
after I gave him Rs 10 lakh.
In the Lok Sabha, the opposition leader LK Advani demanded government
intervention. With regular televised updates about KCRs deteriorating health
fanning the flames, at the centre, the pressure began to mount. Meanwhile,
the Osmania joint action committee was calling for a takeover of the state
assembly on 10 December. In a midnight statement on the eve of this
planned coup, eleven days after KCR began his fast, home minister P
Chidamabaram announced that the process for formation of a separation of
Telangana state would be initiated. KCRs fast had achieved its ultimate
goal; he had become a hero.
Discharged from the hospital on 11 December, KCR called in a group of
journalists on the very next day, to tell them that he wanted to launch a
news channel. He sat with us day and night and did 95 percent of the work,
K Narayana Reddy, the channels CEO, told me. He even wrote the promos.
In three months, and with the impossibly low budget of about Rs 15 crore,
T News was broadcasting from the third floor of Telangana Bhavan. S Suresh
Babu, its executive editor, called it a watchdog, guarding against the
wrong propaganda of the twenty-odd Andhra channels and
counterattacking them when necessary.
The Telangana dialect was used on TV for the first time and millions felt like
they found a voice at last, he said. Though we are limited to ten districts,
we broke even in four months.
ON 23 DECEMBER 2009, facing the mass resignation of politicians from
Seemandhra, the central government backtracked on its promise to review
the formation of Telangana. At an uncertain political moment, with a
movement on his hands whose moves would prove difficult to control, KCR
proposed the constitution of an umbrella organisation, under the leadership
of M Kodandaram, a political scientist and experienced civil liberties activist.
This would be the Telangana Joint Action Committee, whose purpose, the
author Thirumali told me, was to bring all Telangana activists under the
various joint action committees, particularly student activists, back under the
control of political leadership. As YSR had pointed out, the TRS did not have
a monopoly on Telanganabut through the TJAC, KCR could consolidate all

the various Telangana interest groups, pre-emptively forming a coalition to

support his political decisions if he needed to. It was a shrewd move from a
politician who had witnessed both the power and the volatility of a popular
uprising. He chose an opportune timethe protesting Osmania students
(who had a joint action committee of their own) had gone off on a padayatra
to Kakatiya University in Warangal when he made the announcement.
The TJAC would come to comprise twenty-eight organisations and three
participant political parties (the TRS, the BJP and the CPI ML-New
Democracy). Today, it is organised at various levels of leadership, with a
chain of command connected right down to villages. This decentralisation
has strengthened the movement, said A Sridhar, the chairman of the TJACs
Greater Hyderabad chapter.
Over time, the popular and political movements for Telangana statehood
became more and more symbiotic in their relationship. In February 2010,
soon after KCRs fast, the TJAC asked all Telangana-supporting MLAs to
resign. The twelve who did were all re-elected, with staggering majorities.
(This included one BJP candidate who won, despite the considerable presence
of Muslim voters in his district, because TJAC asked these voters to abstain
from voting.) The opposition candidates were decimated. Despite the TDPs
strong cadre and an important backward caste vote-bank in Telangana, the
partys candidates lost their deposits in every seat; so did four Congress
candidates. Neither Naidu nor the Congress chief minister Konijeti Rosaiah
campaigned for their candidates. Embarrassingly, D Srinivas Rao, the
Congress state president, also lost.
Since it is a non-party forum fighting for Telangana, everybody felt they
were part of it. Voters wouldnt respond to a party, but they would to TJAC,
Kodandaram told me. Sridhar agreed. When we criticise the TDP or the
Congress, they dont know how to counter us. We are like a bulletproof shield
for TRS, he said.
For the first three months of its existence, TJAC played second fiddle to the
TRS, before beginning to emerge out of its shadowsomething that caused
growing friction between the two outfits. The TJAC started to announce its
own programmes, usually public meetings or protest marches, such as the
Telangana Million March it planned to hold in March 2011. In February, a
non-cooperation movement had been abruptly aborted after twenty-eight
days. The TJAC wanted to organise another protest, but KCR opposed the
idea. He thought we may have to postpone the march, but the preparations
were at an advanced stage, Kodandaram said. It was not a happy decision
to call off the non-cooperation movement, and we thought the agitation must
continue in other forms. People wouldve questioned our conviction
otherwise. Pittala Ravinder, state coordinator of TJAC, told me that KCR
encouraged Swamy Goud, another TJAC leader, in a bid to replace
Kodandaram, but we told [TRS] that Kodandaram is the undisputed leader
of TJAC. Their apprehension was that TJAC might turn into a political party

after the formation of Telangana.

That KCR could, and had begun to, consider the possibility of what might
happen after the formation of Telangana was a testament to how far he had
brought the movement, and a credit to the TJACs success in keeping up the
pressure. Ever since the TRS had come into being, KCR had depended on
contesting and winning elections to keep infusing life into the movement, and
convincing voters of his sincerity regarding Telangana. (The TRSs leaders
have resigned and contested by-elections so many times in the last ten years
that it may well be argued that the party has accumulated several times the
standard amount of electoral experience in this period.) But once it had the
TJACs support, the TRSs election results were consistently better. Ravinder
told me that at one point, Kodandaram was regularly on the front pages,
and KCR used to be inside, so he felt insecure. He wanted to be the only face
of the movement.
In January this year, as the Telangana bill was being heatedly debated in the
state assembly of Andhra Pradesh, I accompanied Kodandaram on an
awareness campaign to Vikarabad, seventy kilometres from Hyderabad. Even
before we hit the road in the morning, he had addressed two press
conferences. He interacted with traders, politicians, teachers, just about
anybody and everybodyand people readily recognised and welcomed him
with respect wherever we went. It was well past midnight when we got back
to the city, but he had little time for sleep; a series of public meetings
awaited him the next day. Telangana seemed closer than ever before, but
people were afraid to hope. All day they had anxiously been asking him
about what he thought would happen, what the government might do this
time.
They cant turn back the wheel of time, Kodandaram told them, and the
time for Telangana has come.
AT TWILIGHT, the earth trembled in Gaddiganipalli, one of four Dalit
villages near the state-owned Singareni Collieries, in Warangal district, two
hundred kilometres northeast of Hyderabad. I could smell exploded gelatine
in the air from an opencast coal mine nearby. We wake up at night, the
utensils clatter onto the ground, when they conduct blasts, Pokkuri Rajaiah
said. The Dalit activist had been showing me the massive, rectangular mining
craters, up to five kilometres in length, and edged by mango trees in full
bloom, reminders of a more fertile past. Rajaiah said the mining company
bought land surrounding the village, but not in the village, bypassing the
need to provide relief and rehabilitation packages to residents.
I had gone to Gaddiganipalli in late January, travelling through the region
that would soon become Telangana state. Everywhere I went, posters,
banners and graffiti were anxious to claim premature credit for the bill:
Sonia promised Telangana. Sonia granted Telangana. According to the
rhetoric of the movement, bifurcation will solve all the regions problems, and

the movements leaders have been discussing the reconstruction of the

state for some time. Weve been on Planet Telangana for the last three
years, AK Goel, a retired Andhra cadre bureaucrat from Haryana and an
advisor to KCR, told me. We used to talk like it has already come. He listed
out some of the plans theyve been discussing: Compulsory and free
education from kindergarten to post-graduation. Malnutrition and illiteracy
will be attacked together. Every Dalit farmer will be given three acres of land.
Telangana has the best agroclimate conditions to produce seedswe will
make use of that. There will be ten power stations of ten thousand
megawatts capacity.
The whole geography of Telangana will be magnetised by one initiative or
the other and connected to rest of the country, Goel added. As a child I
saw Haryana in a wretched state, but in forty years it has become number
one. Telangana today is what Haryana was forty years ago.
The creation of the new state has set off a cutthroat competition for the
future that Goel imagined. In his press conference at Telangana Bhavan in
Hyderabad, where he ruled out a merger with the Congress, KCR justified his
decision by attacking the Congresss record on Telanganas development:
The state came too late, many young people died, and the problems still
remain unaddressed. Now, hes upped the ante by making aggressive
assertions about how hell manage Telanganas resources; at a recent press
conference, he announced, Let me make one thing clear in my capacity as
president of a political party that is going to come to power in Telangana.
Our government will not release water downstream to the irrigation projects
illegally constructed in Seemandhra.
Because of their political stakes in Seemandhra, no other parties can make
such claims. Perhaps partly as a result, the dividends of the Telangana
movement seem to be flowing almost exclusively to KCR. While other parties
in Andhra Pradesh reel, the TRS continues to grow. YS Jaganmohan Reddy,
who looked set to become chief minister a couple of years ago, has since slid
in popularity; the Telangana issue stole his thunder. Andhra has become a
Congress graveyard, and the TDP looks decimated in Telangana. Leaders
from both the Congress and the TDP are joining the TRS, which is stronger
than it has been since its inception, in 2001. KCR is looking to give tickets to
the senior TJAC leaders and some student leaders who rose to popularity in
the past five years, as well as to his son and daughter.
At the same time, KCR has been cautious not to project euphoria over the
creation of Telangana. Instead, hes replaced the promise of statehood with
that of reconstruction, even as he continues to use the same colourful
language to talk about the latter as he did the former. If you feed donkeys
all the grass and try to milk the cows, you wont get milk. In other words,
Telangana still needs TRS to be the party in power in order to accomplish
reconstruction.

Gaddiganipallis houses have cracked walls, and many of them are

abandoned, falling further to pieces with each blast. Parties like the TRS have
briefly taken up the cause of these villages, and then forgotten about it. The
areas Congress MLA, Gandra Venkataramana Reddy, was the chief whip in
the assembly, but nothing changed. It is because we are Dalits, said
Seggam Sidhu, another villager. We dont have any hope in Telangana.
Once it comes, the government will say, Now there has to be development,
lets exploit our natural resources. Thats what will happen. Sidhu
continued, If these were upper-caste villages, the issue wouldve reached
the assembly and also parliament. I asked him whom he would vote for. As
somebody who has lost land and livelihood, all parties are the same to me,
he said.
At his March press conference, KCR reflected, Once upon a time it was a
movement-oriented party. But Telangana has been achieved, so TRS is a
pucca political party now, dont forget. We will behave like a political party
and talk like one.

Corrections: Medak district is in northern Telangana, and not in the south as

the story earlier stated. 2) Telangana is bordered by Maharashtra,
Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Karnataka and the Seemandhra region of Andhra
Pradesh. The Caravan regrets the errors.