Education Trumps Separatism in Telangana
A march in support of the creation of a separate state of Telangana scheduled for Thursday, has been scaled down to allow students get on with their exams.
AP
Telangana activists block traffic in Hyderabad early this year.
Leaders from political parties and groups supporting the statehood cause say the protest march in Andhra Pradesh’s Hyderabad was snipped after they realized its timing clashed with examinations in local schools.
Harish Rao, senior leader of Telangana Rashtra Samiti, the party which leads political agitation in the Telangana region, told India Real Time on Wednesday that they originally expected about one million people to take to the streets in Hyderabad for at least three days.
Because of the final board examinations that started this week, the march has now been shortened to a three-hour affair, the TRS leader said.
“The movement is for the future of Telangana’s children. We have cut short our plans as we do not want to disturb the students,” Mr. Rao said.
M. Kodandaram, the convener of a joint action committee on Telangana and a professor at the Osmania University in Hyderabad – the nerve center of the agitation in 2009 – said the committee decided to downsize the rally after parents and teachers expressed their concern that students would be disturbed if a large number of people turned up in the city on the day.
Stopping short of calling of the protest all together, Mr. Kodandaram said, “The rally will start only after the day’s examinations are over. Protestors would not block any roads or disrupt transport services.”
Although the protest has been toned down, Hyderabad’s police commissioner A. K. Khan told India Real Time that local law-enforcement authorities will try to prevent it from happening.
“The state police is deploying additional forces in the city and have also arrested some miscreants as preventive measures,” Mr. Khan said.
In Dec. 2009, the Indian government gave the green-light for Telangana to be carved out of the southern Andhra Pradesh state. The government later backtracked on its decision over Telangana and formed a five-member panel on the issue.
The panel submitted some proposals to the home ministry in January this year which have so far been rejected by the people of the region.
Rakesh M., a Telangana activist, expressed displeasure at what he saw as a volte-face by political parties on the protest march and said the agitation might lose steam if repression by the state administration continued.
“The current situation is not good,” he said.
Fuente: India Real Time
