'Changing governance, not govt our goal,' says TJS chief M Kodandaram as party emerges as Congress' key to counter KCR

Hyderabad: The Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee has released its list of candidates for the upcoming state Assembly election, several days later than expected due to prolonged discussions on seat-sharing among the coalition partners of the ‘Praja Kootami’ or People’s Coalition.

The delay, more often attributed to M Kodandaram, president of the newly-minted political outfit and alliance partner Telangana Jana Samiti (TJS), is perhaps indicative of the role the party could play in potentially upsetting KCR’s return to power; the Congress’s Telangana unit certainly thinks so. So far, they have  offered Kodandaram the deputy chief minister’s post as well as a Rajya Sabha seat if he is flexible on the number of seats for TJS.

A former professor at Osmania University, Kodandaram chaired the Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) that spearheaded the movement for statehood, particularly mobilising students and civil society organisations. Fresh from this victory, Telangana is, especially familiar and amenable to the kind of on the ground activism that Kodandaram and the TJAC are adept at.

As the political front of TJAC, what the TJS leader offers the congress-led coalition is a grassroots mobilisation by the civil society organisation in exchange for the price of a cultural shift in politics and governance.

“Over the last four years, the civil society groups have emerged as the main opposition to KCR. It is in this context that I am proposing this alternative,” he said.

Kodandaram says that the People’s Coalition can’t replicate KCR’s strategy of “distributing money and buying caste associations”, rather the focus should be on projecting the alliance as a counter to KCR and mobilising the masses on the basis of a common minimum agenda.

“This (KCR’s strategy) cannot be replicated (by us) and in fact, it won’t yield results. It is a kind of trap. Rather we (the People’s Coalition) must mobilise the people, civil society organisations, youth and caste-based organisations on the basis of the common minimum agenda as decided by the alliance partners,” he says.

However, the discussions on working out an election strategy are still going on.

“To me it appears that parties are not able to visualise more concretely this alternative (mobilising of the masses) to the traditional campaign model that we propose. In order to be successful, we have to go from house to house. Talk to each person. During the course of the Telangana agitation, we followed this and were quite successful. The general public’s involvement in politics has increased because of this campaign method,” he informed.

Considering that many TJS leaders are also activists who have been associated with various social movements over the past three decades, Kodandaram says they have the acceptance and legitimacy that can help bring home victory for the alliance.

TJS, which was launched in April this year, was all set to go to polls independently. They wanted to be able to act and think without relying on borrowed support, he says, but the early dissolution of the Assembly disturbed their calendar of activities. While forming an alliance might not have been their first choice, Kodandaram has come to realise that with the decision to form join forces, the mood has completely changed all over the state.

“We have seen and it has been proved by various survey reports that the opinion is shifting in favour of the Kootami, against KCR. That is a positive development,” he says.

However, despite the urgency, TJS had remained firm on its demand to contest in at least 12 seats out of the 119 going for polls, based on TJS’ strength and capacity.

“We have explained, with data, how we can deliver victory in some of the seats that the Congress has never won in the last 35 years, because we are organisationally strong in these constituencies. Over the past few months, the constituency in-charge in as many as 25 seats have been building a network down to the villages, and with alliance support, we can ensure victory here,” he says.

The TJS eventually agreed to contest only on eight seats, however, Kodandaram has said he has accepted it on the condition that all these seats are in the constituencies of their choice, and are not those that the Congress wants to hand out.

‘It’s not about changing the government, but changing governance’

TJS was always going to challenge KCR, a former partner in the fight for Telangana, on the electoral field; but ironically, the Praja Kootami has put TJS on the same side of the table as TDP, which vehemently opposed the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. They may be unlikely bedfellows, but Kodandaram says they have decided to unite to realise an important objective: “Democracy must be restored and the autocratic rule of KCR should come to an end.”

Things changed after Telangana was formed, he says, “We, as a civil society organisation, decided to act as a watchdog and the TRS, as a political party, decided to work on their own. Though we were not interested in giving unsolicited suggestions, we expected some kind of access to the decision-making structure. In a democracy, the involvement of people in the decision-making process is essential, but they were not interested.”

Kodandaram also says that KCR has an autocratic hold over his partymen and the government; so even ministers were nothing more than rubber stamps and key decisions were not taken in time.

The TJAC, he says, was very critical of the government’s large-scale land acquisitions, and lack of a strong employment policy and measures to handle drought. They asked the government for strict implementation of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. They also insisted that a UPSC-like vacancy system should be adopted by the government for employment, and critiqued the current drought-relief, skill development and education reforms in the newly-formed state.

And so, five years after Kodandaram insisted that he had no political ambitions, the college professor found himself entering the arena. The goal is not to change the government, but governance itself, he insists. For TJS, this means making governments more accountable to the people and ensuring participation, he says.

“In the agenda, we have suggested a series of measures including strengthening the SC/ST commissions, human rights commissions, Lokayuktha and anti-corruption bureaus. We must allow for people to claim government welfare schemes as a matter of right; not treated as charity. So, we have suggested a civic amenities act with a redressal mechanism built into it,” he informs.

And Kodandaram is well aware of how most of the manifestoes are ignored after elections. Which is why, even before seat sharing negotiations, a pre-condition to the alliance was that TJS would have and should have ample control over its implementation.

The author is a freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters