No Naxals will be hurt in the making of Telengana state

Finally! I have finished reading the 505-page Srikrishna Committee Report on Telengana issue (pdf). Above all, I realized two things- Justice Srikrishna is no John Grisham and I hate Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). After wading through hundreds of pages documenting the ethno-religious and social details of the region I find out that the juicy part, internal security considerations, has been censored out, courtesy MHA. What am I supposed to read if not the Naxal angle?

Surprisingly, despite hardly mentioning Naxalism in its report (minus the censored security considerations) the committee report scares the bejesus out of anyone thinking that Naxalism wouldn’t be an issue in the state formation. And it is not the only one. Security agencies (read MHA) have already suggested to the government that creating Telengana will help Naxalism rise again. So the question is, whether Naxalism is a threat for Telengana or merely a bureaucratic excuse for the government to do their favorite thing in the whole world – maintain status quo.

According to the report the government has six options on the table – first maintain status quo, which the committee is against; second, bifurcate the state with Hyderabad as a Union Territory; third and fourth are completely random ideas that have led some to question what the committee has been smoking; fifth, bifurcating the state with Hyderabad as Telengana’s capital; and sixth which status quo with minor changes.

Really, the first four options are no options at all, and we all know New Delhi’s favourite in the last two. So the threat of revived Naxalism will definitely be used as a bureaucratic justification for doing what it always wanted to do, namely, nothing.

However, in my own humble opinion, it would be wrong that just because MHA wants it we presume it is the wrong option (although usually it is a safe assumption). Naxalism will undeniably be a threat for the newly-formed Telengana state as it has been for Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. While Andhra Pradesh has been exceptional at rooting out Naxalism (probably the only success story in the country) it still has leftovers which, according to current reports, are one the revival. The number of Naxal incidents has more than doubled from 2009 (39) to 2010 (88).

Moreover, there are clear indications that the Naxals do have political pull with the Telengana movement, which is logical given their MO. Naxals have been supporting, at least ideologically, the Telengana Movement and recently the Telangana Rashtra Samiti chief, K Chandrashekhar Rao, was heard praising the Naxal agenda. If Maoists have a shot of making buds with one of the primary political parties of a state, that’s bad news. We can hardly cope with West Bengal.

Additionally, there are the considerations of policing infrastructure. I remember Dehradun immediately after Uttrakhand was created. The state hardly had any police. Almost everyone had to be recruited fresh, creating an insufficient force of twenty-year olds. Creating new government, whether in Telengana or Seemandhra will be a daunting task and it is unlikely that the famed Greyhounds, Andhra Pradesh’s special anti-Naxal force which is responsible for Naxal demise, will be split between the states. When hundred-year-old state police of Maharashtra can’t handle Naxals, what will a rookie police do?

In conclusion, while I am almost always against MHA, it seems to me that creating Telengana in today’s circumstances may not be such a good idea.