steps to second partition: Y Samuel reddy

• steps to second partition: Y Samuel reddy

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  • The man is anything but a vendor of humane visages. His rise in politics has been accompanied by more bloodshed than that of any other politician in this state. Not bloodshed for some avowed ‘higher cause’, but bloodshed for the narrowest possible cause: the rise of one individual to political power and prominence. The recent elections may very well have meant many things in terms of popular aspirations, and one has no desire to be cynical on that score. But in the matter of the change of helmsmen, it has merely replaced a man who would find nothing too crooked if it is in his political interest, with one who would find nothing too brutal…Today YSR wishes to be seen as a politician who has responded to the needs of farmers and is determined to do well by them, but in the nearly three decades of his political life, he has not been instrumental in adding one acre of assured irrigation to the parched lands of the constituency that has again and again returned him or his brother (when YSR chose to go to parliament instead) to the state sssembly.
  • This superbly-researched piece (link thanks: Ravikiran) written when he first became the CM of Andhra YSR’s reveals some drops of the blood he had on his hands. Just the bits that trace his bloody rise to power.
  • But the foundation stone was laid by his father, Raja Reddy.
  • Raja Reddy wanted Venkatasubbaiah to hand over the mining lease to him and go. A prominent CPI leader and writer, Gajjela Malla Reddy, brokered a deal whereby Venkatasubbaiah would take Rs 11 lakh and leave the mining lease to Raja Reddy. Venkatasubbaiah refused, and was killed. The mining lease, passed into YSR’s hands.
  • The maternal uncle of the said Vivekanandam, a retired government employee, Rajagopal, set out to Hyderabad, to express his protest to the then chief minister Janardhan Reddy, and to move the high court again. The old man was set upon by a gang in the middle of the state’s capital, and had his hands and legs broken. This was as recently as 1992.
  • The article piles detail upon detail of YSR’s atrocity-ridden rise in politics, which I recommend you read in full.
  • But monetary scams are pretty mild in YSR’s long list of evils. He was, true to the Congress tradition, a communal Chief Minister. Andhra Pradesh is one of the few states to still retain very strong Hindu ethos. As soon as YSR took over, he showed what Samuel Reddy was capable of. From undamming a flood of Evangelism across the state to trying to inject Evangelist poison in Tirupathi to successfully selling temple lands in the Godavari region to banning the Da Vinci Code to making Christian pilgrimages at taxpayer expense, Samuel Reddy displayed exemplary communal behaviour.
  • Perhaps the ugliest footnote on YSR’s death is the decision to rename the Kadapa (or Cuddapah) district as YSR district in his “honour.” Kadapa is a corruption of the Telugu word, Gadapa, meaning threshold. Geographically, Kadapa is surrounded on three sides by the Nallamala and Palakonda hills and acts like a gateway (or threshold) from the north to Tirupathi. This region, which witnessed spectacular prosperity under the Vijayanagar rule, abounds with spiritual richness, and is home to people like Mahayogi Vemana, Annamacharya, and Potuluri Veerabrahmam will now be renamed in the “honour” of a ruthless murderer who mowed down innocent people in his quest for personal power.