Peoples Telangana

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India: Saving the Union of States from becoming a Unitary State.

MOHAN GURUSWAMY The Indian Union of States has reached a critical impasse. Its diversity bound together by the Constitution that was meant to make us a modern, democratic and secular state based on equality and equal availability of justice, education, healthcare and social services, and division of government based on functions is now under grave challenge. India was never intended to be a saffron hued monochromatic state, but a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual state whose diversity made it a nation as never before. Its demographics compound its problems by threatening to swamp the non-Hindi/Hindutva belt into a saffronised dominion. Each state in India is a veritable nation and hence maintaining the balance of political and economic power between them is critical. The delimitation exercise now underway will reduce the weightage in Parliament of the states that did better on giving their people a better quality and standard of life, and hence curbed the popu...

EWS Reservations: Social Injustice to the Backward Classes

T. Chiranjeevulu , IAS( Ret), Founder President BCIF(BC Intellectuals Forum) EWS Reservations: Social Injustice to the Backward Classes The reservation system in India is not a poverty alleviation scheme. It is a special instrument created by the Constitution for social justice, equal opportunities, and redressal of historical injustices. According to the vision of Constitutional architect Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, reservations were designed to provide representation to classes that had been suppressed for centuries — socially, educationally, and politically. However, the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) reservations introduced by the Central Government in 2019 brought a new turn in India's reservation policy. The 103rd Constitutional Amendment, which provides 10% reservation for upper-caste communities that are economically backward, triggered a nationwide debate. In Telangana, this issue became even more controversial. What is EWS Reservation? Through the 103rd Constitut...

A Lion Stirs the Forest

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan How a film star’s electoral upset in Tamil Nadu has ignited fresh hope—and hard questions—among Telangana’s long-marginalised Backward Classes There is a saying, attributed to no particular wit yet beloved of south Indian political romantics, that a lion is always a lion—however many jackals and other animals crowd the forest, there will be only one king. Vijay, the Tamil film star who last month shattered sixty years of Dravidian-party dominance in Tamil Nadu, is being invoked across the Deccan plateau as precisely that lion. The question animating activist meetings and WhatsApp forums from Warangal to Hyderabad is whether his improbable triumph contains a lesson—or even a blueprint—for the Backward Classes (BC) movement of Telangana. T. Chiranjeevulu, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer who chairs the BC Intellectuals Forum in Hyderabad, has been among the most vocal in drawing the parallel. Speaking to an audience of activists and young...

The Case of the Kumbakonam Shankaracharya

MOHAN GURUSWAMY: The late Jayendra Saraswathy, the self styled Shankaracharya was accused of having a former acolyte, Sankararaman, murdered and was sensationally arrested by the Tamil Nadu Police in a midnight operation when he was visiting Mahbubnagar, then in AP. The arrest of this "prince of Brahmins" sent shock waves through the powerful TamBram establishment in Tamil Nadu. How this came to pass is at the most obvious level a tale of hubris. When Henry II wanted to be rid of Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury all he had to do was to loudly exclaim: “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” He had hardly uttered these words when four knights led by Reginald Fitz Urse set of for Canterbury to do the dastardly deed. Henry II Plantagenet was in Winston Churchill’s opinion “the very greatest King England ever knew” but history knows him mostly as the man who murdered Beckett. Likewise Jayendra Saraswathy will be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the man w...

Threads of Change: Understanding India’s Textile Transformation (1890–1940)

By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Introduction: The World’s Loom India’s historical identity is inextricably linked to its status as the primordial cradle of cotton manufacture. For millennia, the subcontinent’s "marvellously woven tissues" served not merely as local commodities but as premier luxury exports, sought after by the elites of ancient Rome, Egypt, and Greece. This "old hand-weaving industry" reached its zenith through a sophisticated ecosystem of hereditary craftsmanship and the robust patronage of royal courts. "The principal centres of this industry then were Dacca, Masulipatam and Paithan, noted respectively for muslins, chintzes and pitambars... in ancient Rome, according to all accounts, Indian muslins and chintzes were the rage of fashionable women." This era of artistic dominance, defined by the production of hand-spun yarn of incomparable fineness, remained the global standard for centuries. However, this ancient heritage was eventually ...

The Discomfort of Questions

When a Norwegian journalist asked India's prime minister about press freedom, the resulting furore illuminated something far larger than a diplomatic spat On a bright morning in Oslo, a journalist did her job. Heli Ling, a Norwegian reporter with accreditation and a press pass, posed a question to a visiting head of state. The question was not polite. It was not intended to be. It touched on human rights, on press freedom, on the condition of journalists in a country of 1.5 billion people. Within hours, she had lost her social media accounts. Her home address had been published online. She was being called an "anti-India spy." She was not troubled. "A small price to pay," she said. Which is, in its way, the most troubling thing of all. That an accredited journalist in a stable Nordic democracy should consider organised harassment, digital erasure and coordinated doxxing a reasonable professional risk tells the observer something important. Not about Ms Lin...