Looking beyond the blackout

BY Darius Nakhoonwala| IN Opinion | 20/02/2014

You don’t say!
Darius Nakhoonwala

Ask the editors if some Indian states are too large and whether they need to be split up and they will say yes. Then ask them if Andhra Pradesh should have been split up and they will flounder.

So most of them focused on the manner in which the Centre midwifed Telangana -- you know, violence in Parliament, TV blackout and all that sort of thing. Also, for once, the virtues of waiting for a day before writing became clear.

The Hindu and the Telegraph wrote very good edits. Also, since it is not every day that a new state is created, the pinkos also piped up and I must say they had an even better take on it. Besides, both wrote the same day.

The Times of India’s edit was the worst. It clucked a bit about the TV blackout but then went off into a tangential rant that is not worth quoting. The paper seemed too overwhelmed by the goings-on to think properly.

The Indian Express let out a shrill howl that the Speaker “…shut off people’s access to the conduct of their representatives during the passing of a highly consequential bill… These broadcasts are a vital tool of transparency that make the institution less remote and allow citizens to keep a watch on their representatives. On Tuesday, that compact between Parliament and the people was violated in an arbitrary manner.” Oh boy!

The Hindustan Times said the decision was “akin to closing your eyes in the hope that the bogeyman will go away.”  It then called the government “either imprudent or naïve” and said it was “in the dock for its cloak and dagger way of pushing the Bill through.”

The Telegraph called it an immoral act and made a solid point that is worth quoting at length. “Neither any precedent nor Article 3 of the Constitution that empowers Parliament to create a new state is of much help in clearing up the doubts… One question that refuses to go away relates to the… doctrine of ‘basic features’ of the Constitution. One element embedded in that doctrine, albeit in an unclarified way, is the principle of majoritarianism and how far this principle is out of tune with the basic features of democracy and the Constitution. Prima facie it would appear that the Telangana bill is valid in law because it was passed by a majority in the Lok Sabha. This evades the more fundamental question of whether the matter demanded a constitutional amendment or not. The government of the day, because it was in such a rush to push through the bill, simply overlooked the need for this requirement. There prevail enough reasons to argue that indeed the matter required an amendment of the Constitution rather than a simple majority in Parliament.”

Indeed. That’s the nub of it and I would recommend this edit to all because the rest of it was devoted to some excellent legal reasoning.

The Hindu was similarly indignant. “The chaos and confusion, and the blackout of television coverage, on the day the Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha all pale into insignificance when seen in the context of the larger failures to find a political consensus, and to reduce differences over crucial issues in the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh… Flip-flops and cynical political manoeuvring were part of the Congress strategy right from the beginning on the Telangana issue.”

Then it made a very strange point. “If the Congress can take any credit from these sordid happenings it is in the browbeating and arm-twisting of the Bharatiya Janata Party…it managed to put the BJP in a fix, and eventually to lend support to the Bill. The two parties appeared to have read each other’s mind very well: to blame the other for any failure to pass the Bill. The BJP blinked first…Irrespective of how the two parties manoeuvre the Bill through the Rajya Sabha, there is very little comfort to be had from such bipartisanship.”

The Economic Times welcomed the creation of Telangana. As a business paper it got to the heart of the matter straightaway. “The root of the Seemandhra resistance to the creation of Telangana can be summed up in one word: Hyderabad. The capital of Andhra Pradesh is where wealthy folks from Seemandhra have invested in real estate; they do not want it to pass to another state.”

The Business Standard made the same point but a larger one as well. “From the beginning, a second States Reorganisation Commission…was the better option. Instead, in search of quick political gains, the UPA chose to avoid this process…”

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