A TEENAGER who set himself ablaze after dousing himself with petrol as part of a protest for a separate state in southern India has died.
Nineteen-year-old S Yadaiah set himself on fire on Saturday at a students rally in Andhra Pradesh state’s capital Hyderabad, demanding the new state of Telangana.
“The suicide note in his bag shows that he was frustrated due to lack of proper employment,” police official Srinivasa Rao said of the school drop-out who grew up in an orphanage.
He declared that a separate Telangana state would ensure jobs for hundreds of youths like him and that he was immolating himself in protest against the delay in its formation.
Such extreme forms of protest to reinforce political, social and economic demands are not uncommon in India and take place from time to time but with little effect, forgotten within days by a largely uncaring administration inured to such extremes.
In the early 1990s dozens of students died similarly after burning themselves in protest against caste-based reservations in colleges and universities which they claimed favoured Dalits or the lower castes.
He is the sixth person to have committed suicide by setting himself on fire in the past few months over the issue of Telangana that has been rumbling on in varying intensity from the 1950s.
Activists demanding the separate province complain that it was a region deliberately underdeveloped and ignored by powerful politicians from southern Andhra Pradesh.
Granting it statehood would result in its economic and social regeneration, they claim.
Last December, after the condition of a prominent local politician on hunger strike demanding the immediate formation of Telangana grew precarious, prime minister Manmohan Singh’s federal government buckled and conceded his request, but backtracked later.
Thereafter, it established a committee that is examining demands for Telangana’s creation much to the ire of local politicians and students who regularly organise protest rallies that often turn violent.
Analysts said youngsters in the region, especially those unemployed believe the formation of Telangana would resolve all their problems.