Telangana Assembly polls: KCR looks to spin success with fish, sheep

He borrowed ideas, invented a control and command structure for the TRS and decided to take a leaf out of the book of one of Andhra Pradesh's most charismatic leaders, NT Rama Rao

Telangana, India’s newest state, is on a roll. And, it’s all because of fish and sheep. The idea is so simple that it is laughable.  When he came to power on the back of a massive agitation led by the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), K Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR), the new state’s first chief minister, decided he needed to start working to turn the TRS, a wartime party, into a peacetime party.

The movement had achieved its target and he needed to set new goals for those who had supported the party. 

He borrowed ideas, invented a control and command structure for the TRS (which is run by a ‘politburo’ with Rao as ‘president’, though he is referred to as ‘supremo’ in most passing conversations) and decided to take a leaf out of the book of one of Andhra Pradesh’s most charismatic leaders, NT Rama Rao.

NT Rama Rao himself was a Kamma, a numerically small but extremely influential landowning caste belonging largely to coastal Andhra Pradesh. His genius lay in cobbling together a broad social coalition that had as its principal opponent the Reddy’s (land owners), the backbone of the Congress.

Using the motif of Telugu atma gouravam (self respect), NTR turned all guns blazing on the Congress for trampling over the pride of Telugu talli (the Telugu mother). 

This identity subsumed within it a plethora of castes that had, for a variety of reasons, their own axe to grind against the Congress, identified as a party of the Reddy leaders. 

This was largely because of Marri Chenna Reddy, one of AP’s earliest chief ministers.

While NTR’s experiment worked for a while and catapulted Chandrababu Naidu, his son in law, to power until the Congress empire hit back under YS Rajashekhar Reddy, the division of Andhra Pradesh saw the emergence of KCR and his party. 

KCR himself is a Vellama, a caste that is numerically miniscule, and even less powerful than the Kammas. While the troops were in battle, caste was a peripheral issue, but when the battle had ended, KCR realised he had to create a social coalition like NTR had done before him, using government policy as a tool. Distributing sheep and introducing fish seeds is part of that tactic. 

Telangana has been known for its arid and parched land, dependent on rain-fed irrigation. A system of tanks existed for hundreds of years but slowly fell prey to land sharks or simply dried up. 

As a result, underground aquifers also began drying up and ground water levels went down.  Landless labour began migrating first, followed by the farmers themselves, choking the streets of Mumbai, Mangaluru, Bengaluru and Nagpur.

Many of the migrants were backward castes but a majority was also scheduled caste – belonging to the communities like shepherds. In 2017, KCR launched a new scheme – he distributed free sheep; and he gave contracts freely to companies to dredge and refill traditional water tanks. The free sheep scheme is a no-brainer. 

The same scheme was utilised by neighbour J Jayalalithaa, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, to great political advantage, only in her case, she distributed free goats. 

Currently, the sheep population of the state is over 10 million: it was started with the distribution of  45 lakh sheep benefitting over two lakh members from low caste communities like Golla and Kuruma (shepherd). The dredging of tanks yielded equally useful results.“The farmers were encouraged to carry off the silt – the thick black alluvial sludge – that they used in their fields,” said Prof E Revathy of the Centre for Economics and Social Studies. Once the tanks were emptied and cleaned, they were refilled with water – using the unutilised water of the Godavari that simply flows into the sea because Telangana never developed irrigation systems.

Then the state government procured fish seeds and simply threw them into the tanks. The outlay of the fisheries department of united Andhra Pradesh in 2011-12 (according to a presentation made by YS Rajashekhar Reddy in 2012 to the Planning Commission) was Rs 114 million. 

This was for 23 districts of AP. In the last budget, the Telangana government unveiled the Integrated Fisheries Development Scheme (IFDS) with a financial outlay of Rs 10 billion. This is for just 10 districts.