When India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called Hyderabad the republic’s “second capital”, he had more than one reason for doing so. Of all the major metropolitan centres today, Delhi and Hyderabad are the only ones that were historically “pan-Indian” even before the arrival of the British. India’s politicians who changed Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Madras to Chennai and Bangalore to Bengaluru cannot, however, deny that these great cities were, in fact, built by the British. Delhi in the plains of northern India and Hyderabad in peninsular India were great pre-British urban centres. A second reason why Nehru dubbed post-Independence Hyderabad a second capital, with the president of the republic residing there for several weeks in the year at the city’s Rashtrapathi Nilayam, was its cosmopolitanism. The city has always been home to a mix of people from different religions and regions. Finally, the central government adopted Hyderabad as a major centre for national institutions and defence and strategic establishments. In the post-Nehruvian era, thanks to the green revolution and economic liberalisation, Hyderabad became a magnet for private sector investment, attracting enterprise and capital from the coastal districts as well as from the rest of India. The growth of Cyberabad brought globalisation back to the inheritors of the once globalised city of Golconda.
Against this background, any solution offered to mitigate the genuine grievances pertaining to the lack of development in the region around Hyderabad, namely Telangana, should not hurt the long-term interests of the city’s growth and development. The uncertainty of the past year in Andhra Pradesh, created largely by the political mishandling of the situation in the state by the national leadership of the Congress party, has already hurt Hyderabad. The media have reported a drying up of investment plans for the city and its hinterland, a crash in real estate values, the accumulation of unused commercial space and so on. Hopefully, the Justice Sri Krishna Commission has taken a long-term view of Hyderabad’s development in putting forward its various options for the solution of the Telangana imbroglio. The commission has essentially played the role of a good journalist, gathering ideas that have been around for some time and putting them together. If the agitation of the 1970s yielded a six-point formula, the present one seems to have produced a five-point menu: status quo, bifurcation, trifurcation, bifurcation with Hyderabad securing a union territory status and being capital of only Telangana (with a new capital for Andhra) or for both regions. None of this is a new idea and what gets finally accepted will depend on the political wisdom of all concerned. From Hyderabad’s point of view, a status under which its own future development would not remain hostage to the provincial and caste politics of a smaller state would be the best option. If Hyderabad is formally declared India’s second capital, a national second capital region can be created and administered by a locally elected government. It is thinking on these lines that must develop if justice has to be done both to the people of Telangana and the future of Hyderabad.
