I get back to politics after a long time. The March 10th events did not move me as much as they did other people. In fact, only yesterday I drove along Tank Bund and looked at the altars on which the statues used to be. There were some with broken noses. It hurt me more to see the inscriptions erased: for one thing, I don’t know which statue was gone; for another, future generations would never know a thing about that person. As we end this story, you will know why that is important to me. In brief, the inscription records history, and even without the statue, it can document history as it is happening around us.
Bammer Potana’s statue was still there, so I had to revise my earlier belief that there was no method in the madness. Actually, before I saw it yesterday (and I have seen it before), I was not sure if they put up the statue in the first place. So well, they did: I mean the aandhrollu did create some space for Potana and Tanisha and Rudrama Devi; if that was not enough there was a less violent and more effective way to get more. But then, Mohandas Gandhi is passé, whatever the Americans have to say.
Anyway I felt let down for a while about Shri Shri’s statue being pulled down: Mahakavi Shri Shri, who always spoke up for the underdogs. I was disappointed with Comrade Vara Vara Rao’s response to the whole operation. But then, it is not the first time that he disappointed passive sympathizers like me; and I know he and his brethren have no use for passive sympathy or passive resistance.
So what is the message of the million March?
Wait until May. After that? Is it going to be as follows?
Arre charminaru medalo, tanku bandu needalo
Bhadram kodako naa kodako andhroda jara...
Gandipeta cheruvulo, musi nadi murikilo
Munchestamro, na koduko andhroda ninnu
Is it possible, with a few thousand people from the hinterland attacking Hyderabad, to sink a population of at least one million adhrollu in Hussain Sagar? Is it so easy to drag real human beings on to Tank Bund and throw them into the lake, as they did with helpless statues?
If Jashua or Shri Shri were standing on top of those pompous altars, they would have sung in chorus: “Guys, don’t sweat. Leave those ropes and stuff. We will walk across and jump, it that is going to liberate you from your shackles.” Sir Aurther Cotton would have taught them engineering tricks to do it more easily, less messily. You know those statues which have just been chipped away? He would have said: “Guys, easy does it. Just whisper into the ears of that old poet out there, he would vanish into thin air.
All that sounds like paranoid talk. And it is. And who created the paranoia? When? It was all on 10th March. Who done it? Your guess is as good as mine.
Quli Qutb Shahi tombs
There is an interesting story about the Quli Qutb Shahi tombs. History tells us that the Sultans got their tombs constructed with care in their own life times. They are all architectural marvels. But there is one, which is unique. It is the one that stands there, half finished. The Sultan was getting it built when Aurangazeb attacked Hyderabad and conquered it: it stands to witness and document history in stone and mortar.
The antique
Let me conclude with a story of Jeffery Archer’s: a woman buys a statuette on her visit to China, which the antique dealer claims to be from the Manchu dynasty. But the stand is broken. So he finds a little stone thingamabob and fixes the statuette on it with fevifast. This woman returns to U.S. or U.K. and a little later she falls on bad times. So she takes this statuette to an antique dealer and offers to sell it.
The antique dealer tells her to come back after a week so that he can get the true worth of it ascertained. When she goes back, he says: Madame, this is an imitation statuette, which is worth nothing more than fifty dollars (or pounds). She is dejected and sets out to go, when the dealer says: But, the stand on which it is fixed, is genuine Manchu stuff. I could offer you 50k for that.
Future generations of Indians (let us hope in the future we will all become Indians) will find as much historical significance in the statues that stand in all their grandeur, the ones with broken noses, and the ones that have been dragged away – which will be known only by the inscriptions on the altars.
Unless another March comes upon us and throws those inscriptions into oblivion.
In the meantime, Andhrans, be happy that they did not drag people on to and off Tank Bund. But beware that time May come.
And brothers and sisters and Vimalakka, if you allow more violence, you are only handing the government a bigger stick. And giving it a longer rope. And the moral of the story is, to repeat the heading: T-state is so much longer away, precisely because of the show put up on March 10th.
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