India mourns a tireless lynchpin
By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - It's ironic that a politician has to die to prove his popularity to
the world away from his doorstep. In the case of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR),
the 60-year-old Congress party chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh,
proof and demonstration came wrapped in a dramatic sequence of events, with
high suspense prolonged over 24 hours intensifying the final tragic news.
He had to go missing for a day and his charred body found amid the mangled
remains of a helicopter in thick forests for the Indian state to acknowledge
his mass appeal. Besides the four others who died in that crash last week, 24
suicides and 104 heart
attacks were reported from his state after the news broke.
Later, slogan-shouting followers accompanied his cortege and a sea of mourners
gathered outside his house in the state capital Hyderabad, putting up posters
like "YSR, we will miss you - People of Andhra Pradesh". Many more thousands
thronged his native village for the burial services. It was not just the people
who were distraught. Many of YSR's party legislators were openly weeping, and
an otherwise hard-nosed TV crime reporter wrote a fawning, emotional blog post:
"For the first time, after I don't remember how many years, I cried over
somebody's death." As a state correspondent reported, almost in surprise, "The
people here behaved like stunned orphans."
The cathartic scenes owed their genesis to a scrupulously created and
maintained political persona - even his death came in the pursuit of a mass
contact program. In a difficult, drought-hit year, the opposition Telugu Desam
Party (TDP) was trying to steal his thunder by talking of the farm crisis and
YSR was zealously guarding his turf, and had initiated weekly surprise visits
to outlying villages. This time, his itinerary was to take him to the deep
south of Andhra Pradesh, Chittoor, down on the Coromandel coast.
The facts, well recorded by now, briefly go thus: The Bell-430 helicopter took
off from Hyderabad at 8:38am amid talk of bad weather. Besides YSR, there was a
top bureaucrat, a security official and a two-man crew. The journey was to be a
long one, approximately 600 kilometers due south, about two hours away. After
just over half an hour, as the chopper flew over the forested Eastern Ghats in
blinding rain, it disappeared from radar and lost contact with air traffic
control.
Official pronouncements were marked by caution initially. All through the
morning and afternoon, the authorities quelled mounting confusion with word
that the chopper had made an emergency landing due to bad weather and YSR was
safe. The location was not being given out due to security reasons, that's all.
This was the news that flashed on television tickers all day. There was even
the comforting snippet that YSR was being sent back to Hyderabad on an army
chopper.
Meanwhile, frantic attempts had been on to establish contact. It was at 4pm
that the confirmation came. The chief minister's chopper was still untraced. It
had fallen off the map somewhere over the Nallamala range, a
12,000-square-kilometer swathe of low hills and pristine forest, the biggest
undisturbed jungle in India outside of the Western Ghats. As a newspaper
headline described it without the benefit of subtlety the next morning, it was
"a tiger- and Naxal-infested forest".
The implication was there for all to see: even if YSR had survived an emergency
landing in the forest, he would have to contend with the heavily armed Naxalite
(Maoist) rebels, who have evidently not earned much renown for human qualities.
All manner of hostage-and-kidnap stories were speculated on, the air was rife
with foreboding.
What unfolded on the ground was one of the biggest manhunts ever. The
authorities pressed everything into service - from satellite imagery (from
RISAT-2) to the jungle skills of the Chenchus, the hunting-gathering tribe
native to the Nallamala hills that relies on bows and arrows to hunt. Also,
5,000 paramilitary troops and many more local police, the anti-Naxal Greyhound
force as well as low-flying Sukhois, equipped with thermal imaging.
The operation took over 24 hours. A call signal received by a mobile handset
finally helped narrow down the search to a small zone. An air force chopper
eventually saw the debris scattered along a hillside. Then they found the five
charred bodies, some of them trapped in the foliage high above the ground.
YSR's body was found, identified by his white dhoti, still strapped with
the seat belt.
Conspiracy theories have not died down entirely. But from available
indications, a simple accident case can be made out. Apparently, the chopper
had swerved off path in the rain and was flying low so as to find a suitable
place for an emergency landing. Tragically, though open stretches lay on one
side, blinded by the rain the pilots turned the other way, right into the path
of hills.
YSR's sudden death has, however, not brought closure to the political story
authored by him. Will it leave the field open for his rivals to swoop in? Will
his young businessman son, Jaganmohan Reddy, be able to harvest the goodwill
his father has left behind? Will a sudden twist in Andhra politics turn the
national fortunes of the Congress? In many ways, this center-state correlation
is at the heart of the issue.
A ruggedly handsome and taciturn man not especially at ease with the media, YSR
was the classic regional heavyweight. His heft counted a lot at the national
level but he was not the sort who would leverage that to threaten center stage.
This "bounded playing field" has been the paradoxical lot of a whole breed of
politicians from the south, whose charisma would not travel well beyond the
confines of their region.
An extreme example was G K Moopanar, a Tamil Nadu Congress veteran who staked
his claim to be prime minister during the late 1990s. That was a hectic period
with a heavy turnover of prime ministers, as many as five in three years.
Moopanar's attempt foundered inevitably, partly for political reasons, but also
because he came across as a wordless wonder, with his English being as
non-existent as his Hindi.
YSR himself never went beyond cryptic, formulaic replies to the English media
but - unlike the glib, studio-hopping politicos of Delhi - he had roots and
knew how to water them. In 2003, the Congress had spent almost a decade out of
power in his state and nothing could seem to touch the powerful Chandrababu
Naidu, chief minister from the Telugu Desam Party. He was riding the crest of a
media-driven deification, having brought management chic into administration,
calling himself the chief executive officer of Andhra Pradesh and promising to
turn Hyderabad into Cyberabad, an information technology center rivaling
Bangalore.
While success stories were being written at the corporate end of the scale (the
dubious Satyam saga among them), at the other end, the curious phenomenon of
farmer suicides was beginning to unfold - small farmers, typically trying risky
cash crops like cotton, collapsing under multiple debts. As Naidu made the
fatal error of keeping his gaze focused on the world of big business, YSR,
until then known as a volatile young turk with a rebellious streak, made the
definitive move of his political career. He embarked on a 1,600-kilometer padayatra,
a marathon walk in the scorching May heat, visiting countless villages over the
vast, arid tracts of his state.
A patented technique of old-style Gandhians like Acharya Vinoba Bhave who
preferred to have a direct connect with the people - and last resorted to by a
politician only in the mid-1980s (former premier Chandra Shekhar, a socialist)
- that summer spent trawling the land lifted YSR into a different
emotional-iconic realm. For Naidu, trapped in his Olympian heights, this was
the coup de grace: YSR and the Congress took the state assembly in 2004 and
also sent a considerable flock to become members of parliament in New Delhi.
In 2008, against all predictions of an anti-incumbency wave, he gritted his
teeth and secured a brilliant, tactical victory. Not only had he retained
Andhra Pradesh for the Congress, but this time he sent 33 parliamentarians to
New Delhi. When his party chief, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, appeared at
the gates of the All India Congress Committee's headquarters in Delhi to pay a
warm and emotional tribute to the deceased leader, talking about how his quiet
pre-election confidence had even energized her, YSR's crucial importance to New
Delhi was subtly underlined.
No one quite said it, but the fact was this. Without the members from Andhra
Pradesh weighing in, the United Progressive Alliance would not have made it to
power in 2004 and would not be sitting pretty like this in 2009 for its second
term. And now, the silent lynchpin of its success has gone. Unless the Congress
finds some way to harness the collective outpouring of grief and deification.
For, the hotline between YSR and the people of Andhra Pradesh was there for all
to see during the minute-to-minute televised coverage of his death and funeral.
On the day of his disappearance, rows and rows of common men and women - Hindu,
Muslim and Christian - sat chanting prayers in hope of seeing him back alive.
The next day they broke down, breast-beating in public, some even committing
suicide.
YSR was a devout, third-generation Christian who went on a pilgrimage to
Bethlehem after winning the May 2009 elections. But, like a quintessential
Congressman of the Indira Gandhi era, he was non-partisan in his prayers. Thus,
he was a regular at the famous Venkateshwara temple in Tirupati (where he
offered gold as thanksgiving). Even his rival Chandrababu Naidu fondly
remembered how they used to go to Tirupati together in the 1980s. (This was
before Naidu had joined the TDP.)
In his death, YSR also managed to refurbish the image of the average Indian
politician as someone who lived a high-risk life in the quest to retain the
common touch, routinely undertaking risky and exacting journeys. Often, they go
against pilot advice in a cavalier spirit so as to keep their public schedule.
Since his accident came while he was traveling to personally check the delivery
system of his welfare schemes and the drought situation in remote villages, YSR
has actually embarrassed the cynics. A senior print journalist wrote about the
narrow escapes she had had while flying on choppers with politicians touring
their home turfs. A TV veteran grudgingly admitted that the Indian politician
does put a lot at stake to win the trust of the people every five years.
But there lies a little bit of the difference between YSR and other politicos.
The others would remember to do "mass contact" every five years. Out of
necessity or not, YSR did do it every five days - it was not necessarily
nobility, it was just the way he did his politics.
The backbone of his popularity was his welfare schemes - housing schemes for
people below poverty level (BPL), a free health insurance scheme for the rural
poor. Not to mention the 70-odd irrigation projects he kick-started, the seven
hours of free power for farmers, the loans he provided at an unbelievable 3%
interest rate to small-scale entrepreneurs, the rice given at two rupees
(roughly 4 US cents) per kilogram to BPL families, the full reimbursement of
college fees for backward sections and the reservation in education for the
minorities.
This route may not have been unique to YSR. But it has to be granted that, with
him, none of these schemes were on paper. YSR ran from one corner of the state
to the other to implement them, personally removing bottlenecks. In fact, his
advice to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had asked his views on governance,
was that "we need to improve the delivery system of welfare measures".
In his state, he did not leave implementation to a laidback bureaucracy or for
middlemen to take their percentage cuts. He oversaw everything himself, almost
obsessively, and lost his life trying to do just that - be everywhere, all the
time. In his parting interview to son Y S Jaganmohan Reddy's TV channel Sakshi
before flying off, he said it was to be a "surprise, unannounced visit to
villages in Chittoor".
However, YSR was not just a Gandhian politician. He mixed his populism with
pragmatism; perhaps, he was the best exemplar of the Sonia-Manmohan political
ideology - a bit of left-inspired welfarism for the poor and right wing
economics for the rich. And, he has had his fair share of controversies. The
opposition accused Reddy's family of amassing wealth much beyond their known
sources of income through private interests in cement, power and media. His son
Jagan is a media baron, with a 23-edition newspaper and a TV channel.
YSR's name also surfaced in connection with the multi-million dollar scam in
information technology major Satyam and for acquiring land for a steel plant in
his home district Kadapa. He was severely criticized for allotting hectares of
land to a cement firm with which Jagan was associated, and for Jagan's
involvement with a highly controversial mining empire in Karnataka.
None of these charges, however, damaged YSR. But YSR's son Jagan, now trying to
get himself installed in the chair as the next chief minister, may not be that
lucky. With YSR gone, he will not have the protective shield to deflect charges
of corruption. It is perhaps in anticipation of trouble of this kind that the
Congress central leadership is diffident about anointing Jagan immediately.
High-level sources say they would rather help him gain experience as a minister
under Manmohan Singh in Delhi rather than plunge him into the heat and dust of
Andhra politics.
The YSR episode has also reinforced a parallel theme: the so-called jinx that
seems to afflict promising Congress leaders. Most of the party's youth leaders
- Rahul Gandhi, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot - have been inducted into
politics after their fathers died unnatural deaths in the prime of their
political careers. YSR's son now joins their ranks. A typical Indian political
story with just a touch of the irrational.
Santwana Bhattacharya is a New Delhi-based journalist who writes on
politics, parliament and elections. She is currently working on a book on
electoral reforms and the emergence of regional parties in India.
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