Red Sun by Sudeep Chakravarti

Author:Sudeep Chakravarti [Chakravarti, Sudeep]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184758047
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

22

Hyderabad, Cyberabad, Hyperabad. It takes forever to get there. Close to fourteen hours from Goa, skirting the northern borders of Karnataka with Maharashtra. The route allows for minimum possible time in Andhra Pradesh and skirts emerging Maoist areas of influence in Karnataka. I’ve been up since 5 a.m., when the bus stops for the first of many checks almost immediately after we cross into Andhra Pradesh from Karnataka, not too far from Bidar.

The usual. Two tired policemen clamber up and inspect luggage on racks and near footrests, while another inspects the luggage hold. The search is perfunctory. Either they can smell an extremist when they come near one, or because this is an air-conditioned bus, we’re all spared rude tone and brusque queries—how can Maoists travel in relative comfort? Their hair-trigger bosses haven’t told them that all Maoists don’t walk around in olive green, carry guns and scream destruction. Or maybe I’m just tired after a long ride and the policemen just want to go home after a long, tense, spirit-crushing round of duty.

The sun brings with it familiar pointers in Medak district, the old stomping ground of Indira Gandhi. She was famously elected to parliament from this constituency, signalling a political comeback after over two years in the wilderness following the Emergency. She still holds a cachet, I see, as we pass the industrial town of Patancheru 30 kilometres from Hyderabad. There she is, smiling from a billboard with trademark white slash in her hair. Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy, of Indira’s and now her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi’s Congress, is the new chief minister of Andhra, after the tech-savvy poster boy of IT and globalization, Chandrababu Naidu, was voted out in the last assembly elections. And so, 22 years after she was gunned down by her bodyguards, Indira is summoned to lend credence to a new rural development programme that the state government has just launched: Indiramma.

Literally, it means Mother Indira. That takes care of sycophancy to dynastic Congress leadership. But it’s actually an acronym that will surely rain rose petals on the person who thought up the double entendre of political economy: Integrated Novel Development in Rural Areas and Model Municipal Areas.

Indiramma, the programme, seeks to cover in stages every gram—village—panchayat in the next three years and provide what the state has not in decades. Primary education to all; health facilities where there are none and better facilities where there are some; drinking water; pucca houses with latrines; drainage; electricity connections to all households; roads; pensions for the elderly, widowed, disabled; even better pre- and post-natal supplementary nutrition, and nutritional care for adolescent girls.

The plan was officially unveiled in Medak district in February 2006 by YSR with an announcement that Rs 230 billion (23,000 crore) would be spent over three years to upgrade 21,000 villages. And it was launched in April that year, though without any concrete indication as to where the funds would come from. If at all this saturation coverage succeeds, the Maoists won’t stand a chance. If

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