"Ordinary thieves spend their lives in wooden shackles; public thieves, in gold and purple”- Cato the Elder
The Telugu adage, a take-off of Cato the Elder’s wisdom, "చిల్లర దొంగకు చెరసాల శిక్ష... కోట్లు కొల్లగొట్టే దొంగకు రాచమర్యాద" (The petty thief earns a prison cell, while the billionaire looter receives royal honours), has never felt more relevant.
It serves as a hauntingly accurate metaphor for the contemporary discourse surrounding land titling reforms in Andhra Pradesh, a landscape where public land is distributed to corporate entities for "peanuts" under the polished guises of progress and revenue generation.
A poignant satirical cartoon recently featured in a leading Telugu daily captures this irony perfectly. It depicts two rodents perched atop a temple threshold, engaged in a pointed dialogue. Prompted by reports of rodents consuming prasadam and its contamination, the illustration serves as a scathing critique of the state's current governance.
In their exchange, the rodents offer a defensive apologia: their consumption of sanctified offerings is a mere instinctual act of survival, a "petty" transgression.
This stands as a stark foil to the conduct of political administrators. The cartoon accuses the latter of a far graver sacrilege: the systematic misappropriation of state resources while simultaneously indulging in hollow political theatre over religious purity.
By juxtaposing the rodents' literal consumption of food with the politicians' figurative "devouring" of public wealth, the artist suggests that while the former is a biological nuisance, the latter is a systemic betrayal of the public trust.
The rodent dialogue masterfully subverts the current political narrative. While the state remains embroiled in theological debates over temple sanctity, the "rulers" are engaged in a more expansive desecration: the systematic dispossession of public land.
Critics argue that the state’s capital-building project has shed its civic soul, morphing into an elaborate real estate venture. The irony is palpable: a government that vociferously enforces religious purity is simultaneously facilitating crony capitalism.
Through aggressive land-pooling, public acreage is transitioned into the hands of private conglomerates at negligible costs. This is not urban development; it is the industrialization of wealth transfer, turning a democratic milestone into a private economic windfall for vested interests, opine the critics.
Perhaps the most profound paradox lies in the ruling coalition’s ideological reversal. Having campaigned on a fervent promise to repeal the “Land Titling Act”, which they once vilified as a "blueprint for looting", the administration now finds itself in a state of administrative self-contradiction.
In a striking pivot, the government is now attempting to appropriate the very land re-survey initiatives that formed the backbone of the legislation they condemned.
This "U-turn" politics is further highlighted by a recent request to the Central Government for a ₹400 crore reimbursement to cover the costs of these surveys. This creates a glaring ethical dissonance: the administration is seeking to monetize a legacy it publicly disowned, profiting from the very infrastructure it continues to politically disparage.
While the government officially presents itself as the guardian of land security for the common man, its practical manoeuvres suggest a different priority. The modernized record system, powered by high-tech mapping data, appears to be serving as a digital conduit for crony capitalism.
The state claims to secure the small landowner’s title but appears to disregard those same rights when large-scale corporate "investments" are at stake.
By streamlining the identification of state assets, the administration has turned a public reform into a private real estate engine, serving corporate interests at the expense of the public exchequer.
As the rodents in the cartoon aptly justify their "petty" instinctual acts, they shine a light on a dark reality: society is quick to blame the "pests" for contaminating a temple offering, yet it treats those distributing public lands for "peanuts" as “visionary leaders”.
In the theatre of AP land governance, the "loot" hasn't stopped; it has simply been rebranded under new management, proving that in the halls of power, the scale of the theft often determines the level of the honour.
