PM Narendra Modi greets Andhra Pradesh CM Jagan Mohan Reddy for his birthday
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On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted YSR Congress Party President and Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Y S Jaganmohan Reddy on his 48th birthday.

“Birthday greetings to Andhra Pradesh CM Shri @ysjagan Garu. I pray that Almighty blesses him with a healthy and long life,” Modi tweeted.

Year-ender 2020 Andhra Pradesh: Much of 2020 has been spent wondering about Andhra Pradesh’s ‘state’. Most people were introduced to the field through looking at maps or elementary school exercises where you were made to memorise capital cities, whether you are new to the geography discipline or not.

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While these activities are indeed geographically fundamental, the discipline extends well beyond the limits of maps and capital cities. One might wonder what all this has to do with juxtaposing Andhra Pradesh in 2020 to comprehend the year that is fading into history. Geopolitics focuses on power, or the ability to achieve specific objectives in the face of opposition or alternatives, as the struggle over the control of spaces and locations. We need to elaborate further, having understood this, to comprehend Andhra Pradesh in 2020.

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We need to understand the geo-policy that has come into play this year to know why the state is on the verge of a dilemma. Do we have capital or are we not? Can anyone in Andhra Pradesh’s residual state, which came into existence in 2014, ever claim to have a capital?

This doubt becomes pertinent in the face of the long-standing legal battle that the state has waged. Amaravati would have been our capital, provided we had a city springing up there. Or at least an appropriate working arrangement. This did not happen during the period of the First Government of the Residual State. Next came another rule.

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This one does not recognise or acknowledge the existence of the capital as “nothing stands here except some temporary structures” The evocative ‘Amaravati’ farmers donated 33,000 acres of land to the government’s proposed land pool. These lands lost their form and character in a jiffy as if someone performed a ‘Houdini’s Act’ only to stay barren now.

The ‘Capital’ is now in litigation and no one knows when and where the final result will arise. What is a capital, by the way? Is it where the ‘Raja’ lives or where the people reside? If there is a puzzle for the people of AP to understand and solve, this one is the toughest.

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And so the debate on the state of the capital in 2020 goes on endlessly. The ‘Tom & Jerry Show’ was next to dominate the year. At one point in time or another, all of us have seen it. There are two players in this show too — the state and the SEC. The state also sought the SEC head’s shift, like the capital shift.

This show also finally ended in litigation and it often, week by week, in an episodic way, keeps entertaining people. Tragedies galore hit the people this year, yet the greatest of all was the Visakhapatnam LG Polymers tragedy that claimed about a dozen lives and hospitalised many more. What was shocking about it was its optics.

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The way people, after inhaling the poisonous gas, fell like ninepins. This too, somehow, was kicked to the litigation box, and there it lies. Among the sections benefiting from the manifesto implementation, of course, there was happiness. Oh. Why not? After all, despite the financial stakes involved, rarely does one come across such seriousness in implementing the promises.

But, all of this came in the wake of the disgusting Covid-19 that the government thought would initially be an easy walk. Hey, no. It did have its toll. It was a blessing in disguise because the government used hospital facilities to upgrade, strengthen the infrastructure, and did a good job by scaling up the tests to the country’s number one position. ‘Naadu, Nedu’ was a further blessing with a facelift of the education infrastructure.

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