The uranium itch and other maladies in Seemandhra

The author travels through the strongholds of the YSR Congress chief where violence is a casual state of being. Will Jagan Mohan Reddy have his revenge?

The YSR Congress headquarters in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, is a white bungalow with a pillared entrance. At the steps is a stocky young man with a shoulder bag. Is he going somewhere? Has he returned from some place? We don’t know. He is just standing there, greeting leaders who come intermittently in their swanky cars. Bhavanam Bhushan is the grievance cell state coordinator of the party. He speaks with a Western accent because he used to be an NRI in Australia but has since returned to Andhra Pradesh and politics. He has been with the YSR Congress ever since its leader Jagan Mohan Reddy, son of former Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy, broke off from the Congress and floated his own party.

When Seemandhra goes to polls on 7 May, it is highly likely that either the YSR Congress or the Telugu Desam Party- Bharatiya Janata Party (TDP-BJP) alliance will come to power. Till a few months ago, it was thought Jagan would get a comfortable majority. Forecasts have shifted since. One recent survey put the TDP-BJP ahead, but it is hard to believe anything in the present political climate. Enormous amounts of money are in play on all sides. A Business Standard article said that of the Rs 195 crore seized in cash across India by the Election Commission till 7 April, Rs 118 crore was in Andhra Pradesh alone. And the only reason that cash is being seized is that there is President’s Rule in the state, making it difficult for politicians to control the police.

Questions over his party’s anticipated majority notwithstanding, Bhushan is not a man given to self-doubt. In the little time that I spend talking to him, he offers certainties and precise numbers: “Landslide win for YSR Congress”, “The TDP-BJP alliance will benefit us by 5,000 votes in each constituency [because] minority votes will consolidate [in our favour]”, “Surveys are managed by Chandrababu Naidu who can manage everything except the people”, “Jagan Mohan Reddy will get 20 [Parliamentary] seats in Seemandhra and two seats in Telangana”, and “Kadapa, you mark it, out of 10 Assembly seats, YSR Congress will get all 10, there is no district of Telugu Desam like that”.

This straight-faced propaganda continues until an ageing man steps out of the office. He is Y Gopal Reddy, who used to be the Congress president of Nellore district but has now switched over to the YSR Congress like numerous others. In Seemandhra, the Congress is a spent force, following the split. Gopal Reddy comes over and begins his propaganda: “One thing I can tell you, people are going to vote for Jagan Mohan Reddy to carry forward the legacy of the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy.” I ask him where he wants the new state’s capital to be after 10 years, once the currently-shared Hyderabad goes to Telangana. For the first time, something beyond vacuous political posturing is noticeable.

Even as Reddy starts speaking, Bhushan interrupts, “It will be Guntur most likely.”

“No, no, no, no,” says Reddy. “Because he is a Guntur man, he says that. I hear that it is Nellore. He is very much biased.”

Bhushan laughs heartily. It is good- natured jibing, but indicative of an imminent tug-of-war between regional interests once the government of Seemandhra, eviscerated from united Andhra Pradesh, is elected. There is also irony hidden here. Seemandhra is made up of two regions—coastal Andhra and Rayalseema. Guntur and Nellore are both in coastal Andhra and so is the town of Ongole, which many see as the frontrunner in the race to become the capital. Jagan Mohan Reddy and Chandrababu Naidu both have their constituencies in Rayalseema. But no one thinks that region is going to host the capital. Rayalseema is the impoverished cousin. Wealthy coastal Andhra and its flourishing cities are where big business is located—run by the barons who come to the rest of India’s notice when they attack each other with pepper spray in Parliament.

There are three kinds of heat, says the driver—in Telangana it is the heat of coal, in Coastal Andhra it is the heat of water, and in Rayalseema it is the heat of stone. For Kadapa, that is a metaphor waiting to grab you by the throat. The heat is like wet gravity, a weight pulling you down with your sweat. The stones are strewn everywhere, much of it going into the many cement factories in the district. One of them, resplendent with lights at night like a glittering city, is Bharathi Cement plant. Bharathi is the name of Jagan Mohan Reddy’s wife. This is the district that his father, the late YSR, made his kingdom. He never lost an election here and the only time the Congress lost was when YSR wanted it to lose.

The story of the YSR family begins with violence in a land where violence is a casual state of being. The name it goes by is ‘factionalism’—opposing groups in a village, town or district at war for generations. The phenomenon can be traced all the way back to a time when kings used to rely on local warlords to be their agents. YSR’s father and Jagan’s grandfather, Raja Reddy, was a late entrant to it, but one of the most ruthless. He was made a partner in a barite mine because of his muscle power and then allegedly killed the owner to take it over. When barite was found to be a useful element in purification of petroleum, its price shot up and the YSR family found itself suffused with cash and ready for the next step—politics . As the late civil rights activist K Balagopal wrote in an EPW article in 2004, ‘With the money flowing from the barites mines in his pockets, YSR was in a position to undertake the transformation of ‘village factions’ into full-fledged instruments of political and economic domination at the highest level… The money was used to buy the support of village factionists. The factionist would be helped to overcome his rivals and establish unchallenged power over his area of operation. If a factionist was too adamant and did not heed the call, a rival would be funded to rise against him. A lot of lives would of course be lost in the process, but then that was, for these gentlemen, a matter of no moment. Once a sufficient monopoly of control over the local factionists was established, the leader’s political-economic future was ensured. Elections would be concluded in his favour, and his muscle power would ensure that he monopolised all the civil/excise contracts he coveted. This sounds bland when stated in this fashion, but the process involved tremendous amount of violence and inaugurated a veritable regime of terror in the area.’

Factionalism has changed form in recent times and is not as cutthroat as it was in the old days, says a local journalist. The level of violence has reduced. Absolute loyalty to the leader, which was the basis of villagers willing to kill without question, is fading away and they also need to be paid well now. But markers of that culture are still present across Kadapa.

We go to the village of Kodikandlapalli, a short distance along a side road from the highway. There is nothing there except shrubbery, and, if you look closely enough, foundation stones of houses. The entire village had been burnt down two decades ago in a bout of factional violence.

The villagers were resettled along the main road. Some of them are sitting on a cot near which is a pile of onions, the only crop they can grow because of the soil’s aridity. They are Telugu Desam Party supporters. Some distance away is the other half of the village, Congress supporters. They don’t talk to each other. There had been an uneasy truce for six- seven years in between and relations were cordial. One of the villagers tells me that they thought the enmity was over, but then a TDP leader was attacked with a bomb and the state of relations reverted to the mean.

It is difficult to unravel the chronology of the cycle of violence, but this village’s recent one goes like this: in 1990, a TDP leader was murdered; in 1991, five Congress supporters were killed in revenge; the next day, on the festival of Ugadi, attackers came while they were playing cards and burnt the village down; in 1994, all the cases were dropped after they made a truce and refused to stand witness against each other; in 1999, two Congress leaders were killed; in 2010, bombs were hurled at a TDP leader, and though he survived, two others died.

An old woman in a red sari and pale pink blouse talks about how she will only vote for the TDP because its leaders gave them their new houses. She gets more and more angry as she speaks—until, her face laden with grief, she lets out that her son is in jail.

We see an overweight man dressed unusually in a T-shirt and trousers. He says he is a policeman accompanying a prisoner who has come on parole to attend his son’s wedding. The prisoner is 68-year-old Venkat Ram Reddy, who has been convicted of a 1999 murder.

As we talk in the verandah of his home, he points to his wife’s hands. One of her index fingers is oddly bent. It happened when the village was burnt and she suffered an assault. He says he has been implicated in a false case. I ask him why the fighting does not stop. “It is not in our hands,” he says. “Any party, one leader will live, all others will be suffering.” In the village of Bhoomaiahgaripalle, Raghav Reddy, the sarpanch with a white flowing beard, points to his forehead where there is a boil. He complains of an itch in other parts of his body and displays a skin ointment tube. It is late afternoon and he has just returned after participating in a procession that YS Avinash Reddy, Jagan Reddy’s cousin, took out to file his nomination papers for the Kadapa Lok Sabha constituency. It is a seat that Jagan had won last time, but he is now contesting the state’s Assembly polls.

Raghav Reddy blames his itch on the uranium mining and processing that is happening a few kilometres away in Thummalapalle, where there is a Uranium Corporation of India plant. The project came up with the support of Jagan’s father, YSR. When Chandrababu Naidu had been Chief Minister, the same YSR had joined activists in scuttling a uranium mining project in Nalgonda, another place in Andhra Pradesh. “But once he came to power, to please the Centre he agreed to have a uranium plant here,” says K Jayashree, Kadapa district convenor of the Human Rights Forum, an umbrella group of activists who operate across Andhra Pradesh. She has been leading an agitation against uranium mining in this region for years.

Initially, the villagers were in favour of it because they thought it meant jobs, but that thinking has changed because of the skin ailments they suffer and the depletion of water sources (because mining results in water channels being cut off). “Earlier we used to drink borewell water, but we have stopped because the water got polluted. Now we drink the water supplied by UCL,” says Raghav Reddy.

This then is his situation: he thinks the fallout of uranium mining is disastrous for him and his village, and he still goes campaigning for the very family that let this plant come up. Outside his house, there is a tree under whose shade villagers are sitting. All of them claim to have an itch in some part of their body. Many pull their shirts up to show patches of hardened skin. And yet this is really not an election issue. I ask them why they still support the YSR family if they okayed the plant. “There is no strong leader in the opposition, so we have to vote for them only,” says one of them.

Later, Jayashree who visits these villages frequently, says she has never heard so many people complain of skin ailments. She thinks the effects of uranium mining in the area are only getting worse.

The day Jagan Reddy filed his nomination for the Pulivendula Assembly seat, the town had come to a stop. Newspapers had photographs of people in the streets clogged like flies around jaggery. I reached Kadapa in the evening and was told that he would make a speech at a place called Kamlapuram. It was around 9.30 at night. A policeman said thousands of people had been waiting since afternoon and were going back because there was no sign of the man.

In a corner of the village, there was a gathering with television crews waiting for him. It was almost midnight and people were still milling around. And then, just as they started giving up on his coming, suddenly there he was, his arrival marked by a motorcade of cars that never seemed to end. Jagan stood on top of a modified bus with men and women cheering wildly all around. He didn’t speak a word and just greeted them from atop with hands joined together. They didn’t seem to mind that this was all they would get—a glimpse.

The next afternoon, I went to Pulivendula and it seemed like a sleepy town on a weekend with empty roads and downed shutters. This was where Jagan’s grandfather, Raja Reddy, is alleged to have caught a Tribal who had robbed a woman and, dousing him with kerosene, set him aflame in public. It gave him a reputation of terror that he held all his life till he was killed in a bomb blast in the late 90s.

In a white stately house in the middle of town, I spoke to YS Manohar Reddy, Jagan’s uncle and cousin of YSR. He said he had been a reluctant entrant to politics, preferring to concentrate on the municipality. Another brother looked after the constituency, and yet another, the district. His side of the family had six brothers and all of them were in politics with Jagan.

“For 70 years, our family has been associated with this constituency,” he said, “My grandfather, Venkat Reddy, was in Balpanur [village]. He was probably the first convert in Kadapa district. He was asked to leave the village.” He spoke of the family being responsible for development in the region, from spinning mills to sack factories to institutes that offer free education. But when it came to the violence associated with the place, his answer was short and succinct—“ Nothing like that.” Given the level of opposition here, it might even be true now.

SeemandhraTDPYSR Congress