Telangana ideologue Prof K. Jayashankar

Telangana ideologue Prof K. Jayashankar, a former vice-chancellor, passed away on Tuesday morning at his residence in Hanamkonda after battling liver cancer for over a year.
He was 76. Throughout the day, hundreds of people visited VSM Nilayam at Advocates’ Colony in Hanamkonda, where Prof. Jayashankar was residing at Flat 401, and Ekashila Park where the body was kept in state for mourners to pay their respects. He had been diagonised with cancer on June 27 last year at Hyderabad’s Institute of Gastroentero-logy and was undergoing chemotherapy. A bachelor, he had adopted a boy.
A Ph.D in economics from Osmania, the professor was vice-chancellor of KU from 1991-94 and registrar of Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages from 1982-91. The solemn occasion turned ugly when senior Congress and TD leaders, who had come to pay their respects, were attacked and chased away by activists of TRS and the Kakatiya University Joint Action Committee.
Wish for T remains unfulfilled
Telangana ideologue Prof Kothapalli Jayashankar, who passed away on Tuesday, had one last wish: A separate Telangana state.
“I want to see a separate Telangana when I am there. That’s my only wish and desire,” said the professor, who battled liver cancer for almost a year. A familiar face at any major Telangana meeting, particularly those organised by the TRS, the soft-spoken professor had been a Telangana proponent right from his student days.
He walked out of his Intermediate class to protest the state reorganisation in 1952. In 1962, and in 1968, he was part of a campaigns which rocked the region.
He backed all those who fought for separate Telangana since its merger with Andhra, right from Marri Channa Reddy and P. Indra Reddy to Mr K. Chandrasekhar Rao of the TRS to whom he was the guiding spirit since 2000. “He was a fatherly figure and the guiding spirit of Telangana movement,” Mr Rao used to often say, and would touch his feet in reverence, at times in full view of the public.
Prof. Jayashankar often said that unequal distribution of river water was the root cause of separate Telangana movement.
“The reason for the resistance of people of Telangana to join Visalandhra is the fear of exploitation in the enlarged state and the reason for their reluctance to continue in the present state is the actual experience of being exploited,” he once wrote. He pointed that many states, including West Bengal and Kerala, were smaller than Telangana and were doing well.
He has a large body of work on various aspects of the Telangana problem, economic development and educational economics and administration.
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Regards
M Chandra Prakash