Statues vs Lives

[suneetha achyuta]

Statues Vs Lives

 

Those of us who went to participate in the Million March on the Tank Bund were dismayed when a few young men started to break the statues of 'Great Telugu poets' on Tank Bund. Many of us tried to stop the men without success. The young men were few in number but the large crowd simply looked on, sometimes cheering, but mostly acquising. The ones who tried to stop them were also few in number - mostly the 'progressive' group. We were outnumbered and outmatched by the young men's ferocious responses.

 

Till then, the March was going on peacefully, with groups of people arriving with thier respective banners. I met friends and supporters of Telangna from different fields and we all greeted each other with enthusiasm. There were feeble murmurs about this being 'our Cairo' march. Those of us who lost contact in that crowd identified our respective locations by the names of statues - Molla, Yerrapragada, Tikkana. They were positioned there as the symbols of Telugu culture by erstwhile CM, late NT Rama Rao, the great champion of Telugu self-resepct. They have been subject of some humour and some anger, but reluctantly one has come to accept them as part of the landscape. We also joked that the statues seem to be of some use!

 

I spotted Telangana Praja Samithi, Telangana Railway Employees Association, Telangana RTC Employees Association, Telangana Lawyers' Association, Doctors Association, Movement for Peace and Justice, Telangana Teachers Association, various units of the Telangna Joint Action Committee apart from the predominant presence of BJP and ABVP. They were marching from one end to the other. Smaller groups like Singidi, Chaitanya Mahila Samakhya, Mahila JAC, Hyderabad Forum for Telangana made their presence felt by gathering around a statue and giving slogans.

 

Most of the slogans were pretty commonplace: Give us our Telangana; We will take our Telangana; Nobody can stop us from taking Talangana. The small groups gathered around the statues were specific in their slogans: We want our water, we want our rivers, give us our Telangna; we want our Telangana culture, we don't want the imperialism of Andhra culture; we will take our Telangana for the sake of all the martyrs.

 

Nearly 600 people have committed suicide leaving notes that they want Telangana state to be declared. The sucidies notes were specifically related to the events that they saw as preventing the formation of a state: Central government going back on 9th December statement; the resignations of all the Seemandhra MLAs and MPs; Telangana MLAs and MPs from Congress and TDP going back on the promise of resignations; particular statements of political leaders; obstacles to different protest marches and agitations.

 

Some of us reached the venue despite numerous traffic diversions, scaling the Tank Bund from smaller bylanes. But most others had come through long and tortuous journey. Police had started detaining activists in ten Telananga districts from 5th March. Numbers of such detained people ('bound over') range from 25,000 to 1,00,000, according to different reports. More people were detained today. MLAs different political parties tried to march to the Tank Bund from the Assembly and were detained. We heard people saying that it took a whole day to reach Hyderabad from Nizamabad, a neighbouring district. Due to traffic diversions, it took more than two hours for people to reach from the bus stations or railway stations to reach the venue.

 

The March was put under heavy surveillance purportedly to conduct the Intermediate exams that have been going on from 1st March. The Telangana Joint Action Committee, a conglomoration of different employees associations, political parties and other groups had given the call for this march. Reportedly Telangana Rastra Samiti wanted the march to be postponed but the groups everywhere had already got ready for the march. They requested the government to consider postponing the exam. Having got a no for an answer, they decided to hold the march from 1.00PM to 4.00 PM, so as not to inconvenience the students taking the exam. Ironically, not the march but the police succeeded in doing what they alleged the march would do. Today, many students found it nearly impossible to reach the exam centres on time, as the police put up nearly 500 additional check posts, instructed everyone setting out to carry an identity card, closed off several roads and diverted traffic to bylanes!!

 

When the largely young male crowd reached the Tank Bund, breaking the iron barricades or scaling the tank bund, there were no leaders to address them nor was there any programme till in the evening when the pledge for Telangana was to take place. The police had detained all the JAC leaders early in the morning and denied them permission to hold a meeting. Since no vehicles were permitted nor the shops allowed to open, there were no arrangements for drinking water.

 

For the past few months, the agitation had been picking up in all the parts of the Telangna. Srikrishna Committee report was slammed, burnt and burial rites conducted at several places. Several forums had come out with specific critiques of the report. Students have been boycotting exams in all the universities. Their marches, dharnas or protests have been continuously teargassed and fired at with rubber bullets. Lawyers have boycotted courts, sought represenation in promotions, marched in Delhi and even attracted strictures against protesting from the Supreme court. Employees went on a non-cooperation movement for sixteen days. The government came to a halt in Telangna leading to the historic instance of non-payment of salaries to nearly 4 lakh employees on the 1st of this month.

 

Employees played favourite games or organized Telangna Dhoom Dham at offices. Telangana Dhoom Dham, a cultural programme had come to articulate the grievances of the regions's people in local idiom and culture - sucidies of farmers, problems faced by school students due to the imposition of standard Telugu, large scale unemployement among the youth, dispalcement due to Special Economic Zones or mining policies, irrigational inequalities plaguing its agriculture, drought and migration in Mahboobnagar, flourosis in Nalgonda due to lack of safe drinking water. The idiom is not of heroism but of loss and anguish.

 

By the end of last month, one heard that fatigue was creeping in among the people, of keeping thier lives on hold for this agitation, of immense frustration about the inaction of the politicians, of the indifference of the central government to the loss of lives in the region and the broken promises. Despite the occasional slogans of elimination of the enemies of Telangana, one never saw violence breaking out against any migrants from Coastal Andhra who are to be found in almost every nook and corner of Telangana districts. There has been some burning of buses and police vehicles over the last one year. The government of course responsed by slapping thousands of cases against the agitators, especially the students, which were withdrawn only after combined opposition was joined by the ruling party MLAs to demand their withdrawal. 

 

The breaking of statues was obviously not an act of heated emotions. Despite the appearances of sentiments, emotion and passion among all the agitators, which is used to denigrate the movement and its goals, to any close observer, it is very clear that not a single one of the programmes in the last year's movement would have succeeded without careful planning. From 2009 onwards, hundreds of big meetings have been organized, where the least attendence is 10,000. Smaller meetings are even more numerous. The famous Warangal meeting last year had more than a lakh attending. Marches and bandhs in Telangana and Hyderabad, including to the Assembly must require a great deal of prior prepatration. The statues were chosen with precision, identifying which belonged to which region, vandalized and some were 'immersed' in water. 

 

The young men were in mood to listen. All the women activists were obviously shocked, tried to plead with them, explain or prevent them. But, women, like in all other programmes of the movement were outnumbered. The number of women on Tank Bund was within three to four hundred. The women students were conspicuous by their absence, despite being such a major and integral part of the student movement. Coming from first generation agricultural families, they want employment and a suitable marriage. Like thier male colleagues, they cannot afford long periods of education, at the end of which there was no hope of employment. Telangana state, for them means a secure future, where their parents can cultivate the land with assured irrigation, where they can get an employment and look forward to a peaceful married life. Though militant, very few seem interested in thinking beyond the issue of Telangana and thier future there. The few women students who have emerged as leaders are not ready to be accepted into the existing formations - political parties or joint action committies.

 

Representation has not been an easy issue for the Telangana movement. Leaving aside the games of the political parties, the leadership of the movement has been a steadily contested issue. Muslims, backward castes and Dalits have consistently critiqued the emergence of Prof.Kodand Ram as a leader. Mahila Joint Action Committee, Gaddar's Praja Front and several Joint action committees of Osmania University reflect this dissatisfaction. Issues of representation have been discussed with some depth in smaller gatherings too. Million March is perhaps the first event in which all these committees and fomations worked together, brushing aside the discomfort of the Telangana Rastra Samiti with the event and not even bothering about the support from other political parties.

 

The overenthusiasm of the Telangana Rastra Samiti activists in vandalizing the statues was hard to be missed. "Is there any statue here which belongs to Telangana region? Why don't they ever put up 'our' people's statues here?" They ignored our attempts at placating them: that there are a few statues of Telangan people, that the statues they were trying to break were of ancient poets who form our common cultural heritage, that they had nothing do to with the current situation in Telangana, that once the Telangana state gets announced, we could have the statues or 'our' own people. In fact, they seemed puzzled by this attachment to the statues. An anguished 20 year old boy whom we tried to prevent screamed at us, "My life has gone (to dogs). I don't care for life or future. And you are worried about these statues?"

 

As if to reinforce his anguish, when I reached home, the headlines, scrolls and panel discussions on seven to eight Telugu news channels was not about how and why the government and the police responded to a simple mode of agitation of marching on tankbund with such repressive measures. It was predictably about vandalism, violence, entry of 'other' (read Maoist) elements into Telangana movement and the great dishonour to Telugu culture!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

--
A.Suneetha
Senior Fellow and Coordinator
Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies
2-2-18/49 Durgabai Deshmukh Colony
Hyderabad 500 013
Phone: +91 40 27423690
Fax:     +91 40 27423168

[R Srivatsan]

The question Gaddar and the others asked on TV was a blow on the nose: why do you grieve the destruction of statues when you never said a word about the hundreds who committed suicide?

 

Three things occurred to me when I was watching the TV footage and interviews. 

One, why is there so much anguish about statue destruction?  Is this because it reminds us of the destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban?  Do we feel so uncomfortable because of the nearness to what has the connotation of ''barbaric senseless acts of cultural destruction' by 'Muslims'?

 

Two, and yet, these so called barbaric acts were performed a) extensively in the French Revolution! b) during the October Revolution and c) redoubtably with the Lenin statues after 1990!  Statues are symbols of established culture.  They are not simple objects of visual beauty -- or rather, objects of visual beauty are statements of forcce of the established aesthetic canon.  And let us not forget that each and every (well, 90%) of the models for the statues on Tank Bund were NTR's face!  When he was asked about this during installation, he responded 'there is nothing wrong!  There are no visual images of most of these great people, and I have acted all these roles'!  The establishment of the statues on Tank Bund is unfortunately, and I say so genuinely because I had a secret fondness for them, a sign of Andhra cultural domination.

 

Three, and here I am drawing on my colleague Moid's question that was asked of Muslims in a completely different circumstance, with blinding force!  Do the Coastal Andhra's even begin to wonder why they are hated so much?  There was no evidence of this -- it was seen as vandalism, uncouthness, but if such vandalism and uncouthness occurred as part of a Telangana movement, the establishment has to begin to wonder why they are so hated!

Written in the heat of the moment!

 

Srivats

--
R Srivatsan
Senior Fellow

[shefali jha]

Far away from it all, but just my two bits of distant thinking. I thought those statues were a bit of a joke, but of course it's not a surprise that the media would focus on the 'vandalism'. Etemaad waxed eloquent about the statues and their destruction too, on the front page. I've been reading the news online- Deccan Chronicle and Etemaad so far- and one of the respondents to a DC report actually made that connection between the Bamiyan Buddhas' demolition and the destruction of these ridiculous statues (sorry Srivats!) 

But I have to confess I find it difficult to share in your ardour for the revolutionary potential of the movement. The most disturbing image for me- and it could be totally wrongheaded, the way the photo was framed left a lot out- was a photo of 'activists' planting BJP and TRS party flags on a 'dome'. Unspecified dome, who knows which or where, but brings back memories, all bad. Who knows where the hate is going to go next? I know that the politicians were repudiated today, and there was all this wonderful energy and different groups that Suneetha has written about, but isn't it a bit easy for us to pick on the mainstream press and their predictable reactions to calibrate our own stance and politics against?

[Susie Tharu]

Statues are after all only symbols for subjects. Susie

--
Susie Tharu
A 27/2 , 1st Crescent Road, AFOCHS, Sanikpuri. Hyderabad 500 094

[Lalita K]

i am against destroying statues. dont see any great politics. i also think it is not the people who attacked these 'symbols' it is the few new guys who strted joining the crowds with others giving support verbally. i have a feeling it is the same type of people who did the hoolignism earlier in osmania too. and i dont think they are progressives. that is what the police wants us to believe. infct arvind rao already said it is iftu and cpiml to discredit everything.

 

lalita

[R Srivatsan]

When I say French, Russian revolutions, I don;t mean the revolutionary reconstruction of the acts of vandalism.  When we say revolutionary potential, we normally think of the logic of progress that has come to orient and determine the very way in which we look at polltics. Among the writers about the French Revolution, there have been graphic descriptions of the kinds of excess that were committed (the royalist historian Taine was an eye witness to women baring their breasts on balconies in full view of the public when the aristocrats were dragged to the guillotine).  There is an obscene excess that haunts these events, and often, the Revolutionary narrative sanitizes them into a history of progress.  For example if the Russian revolution did not succeed, there would have been no orthodox marxism to determine the correct and true way to understand these events.  They would have remained acts of hooliganism -- as does the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas remain as a collosal symbol of a catastrophic culture. And uncomfortably does this explanation hold for the destruction of the Babri Masjid?  Does it too remain an act that is a collosal symbol of a catastrobic culture?  I simply don't know how to think here yet without the certanties of narratives of progress. 

 

So what am I (app)lauding?  I am not sure -- only that there is enough force in the Telangana movement to begin to reject established symbols of excellence of a culture that once appeared united and unanimous.  It is precisely the excess that brings life back into politics that goes beyond interest group activism and negotiation.  Life in its filthy, repulsive, exciting complexity,

Srivats

 

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Susie Tharu <susie...@gmail.com> wrote:

[suneetha achyuta]

Images speak their own langauge. And I am against such demolitions as it is an extra burden on the public exchequer. Right now, GHMC is going to spend a lot of precious public money on rebuilding these stautes! But, I would be cautious about using the words like 'hate' in relation to the act of statue demolition, despite the fact that these statues have been liked by people from all the regions. One cannot forget that they were set up there as a symbol of the coastal andhra (upper caste) political hegemony heralded by Telugu Desam in the early 1980s which is also now at the centre of opposing Telangana state. It is this party that has consolidated the Telugu identity as never before - Hinduising it in the process - wherein the Muslim history of the state and Hyderabad was almost erased from school textbooks and public memory; over the last two decades it is this Telugu identity that has been used to unleash the forces of liberalization with Telangana 'land' at its focus. It is precisely this Telugu identity that is being questioned now. I am surprised that these statues have remained unbroken till now!

 

The word that comes readily to my mind is 'cynicism'. This describes the attitude with which the Telangana question has been dealt with by coastal Andhra people in general and politicians in particular (and to a large extent, the uncomprehending English language intelligentsia) - that looks down upon this struggle as misguided and trivial. This cynicism - that nothing will come out of this - cannot be missed by Telangana people, leave alone people like me who inhabit both spaces. In the face of this cynicism, I would say that the movement and the people have been extremely patient and largely peaceful. This has not allowed much space for leaders to resort to extremist language. Whenever KCR raised stupid slogans, there were a whole lot of Telanganites of various hues condemning his provocative language and reclaiming the movement ethos. Perhaps it is due to this ethos that this isolated act of 'statue demolition' seems to stand out.

 

By the way, I just remembered that some time back there was a demand to set up the statue of Komaram Bhim on the Tankbund. I believe that the govt., after accepting it, said that it should be built by Tribal welfare department as he is a 'tribal', without sanctioning any additional funds. As this department is always starved of funds, just like the irrigation projects of Telangana, Komaram Bhim still awaits his turn, along with several other Telangana and Hyderabadi historical figures to occupy the space on Tank Bund.

 

 

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 8:40 AM, shefali jha <shefa...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Rama Melkote]

Reading all the mails ....

Suneeta has described what happened on the TankBund.

I can only write about what I felt. When we-  me , Lalita, Sajaya, Suguna, Sumana and Vijay somehow managed to climb on to the Bund with great difficulty, I felt a certian joy . The Bund was almost empty and we could run around. At the other end, the flyover end, there were some people. Soon the Bund started getting filled up. Hard to beleive that so many people defied all the restrictions and managed to arrive there. We could recognise many people.  we kept walking and when I reached Yellapragada I felt tired and sat down on the steps. Lalita and sajaya were a little away at another statue. Suddenly someone pulled me away saying they[?] were throwing stones. I could not understand what was happening. Soon realised that the boys were trying to destroy the statues. I held one boys hand and begged him not to do it . meanwhile sajaya, lalita and others were all there. we all tried to prevent them. Some one asked me to stand there and stop them as they might listen to me. For a few minutes they talked but others joined and  we tried again and again. Nothing seemed to work when we saw others arrive with rods which were used by the police as barricades , we gave up. I write all this just to recapitulate. At that point, my only feeling was despair and pain. I did not want anyone to be killed in the melee,  it will be worse for the T movement. Ratnamala, Jeeven and many other women I knew. Many felt helpless, many also could not care less. What answers could one give  to questions --where is Komaram Bheem? Kaloji?  there are a hundred cases foisted on us , six hundred people sacrificed their lives...

When I began to think about it, I could neither rationalise the demolitions in the name of T nor condemn the boys outright  for the action cannot be seperated from those who committed it.

My own location being different from theirs, yet perhaps not oppositional , I wondered how I would feel in their place.  I can only hope that they do no repeat themselves .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ratnamala, Jeevan, and many other women I knew could not stop them..    

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:36 PM, suneetha achyuta <suneet...@gmail.com> wrote: