If I remember correctly from news in the media at that time, Bansi Lal (then CM of Haryana) proposed that Telugu would be taught as 2nd language in Haryana schools leading to future Haryanavis knowing at least two Indian languages, one from North India (Hindi) and the other from
Haryana Govt. also had the plans, if I remember correctly, to have a special ‘sister states’ relationship between Haryana and Andhra, on the model of sister-cities. Unfortunately, it seems to have been only one-sided ‘love affair’, mainly on the part of Haryana, with little enthusiasm and response from Andhra. Andhra politicians probably did not see much benefit from such cozy relationship with a remote northern state, and might have thought that if Andhras were going to put any effort in north
Real kudos to Bansi Lal, indeed! His was a great nationalistic and linguistic vision.
I wouldn't give much credence to Bansi Lal either.
>>> Must be hard for you to give credit to anyone's good thought and effort.
>>> That's a wrong way of putting it - calling someone old, eccentric and senile for proposing and trying to implement a great project. He probably did not have enough talent around him and lacked outside help to carry out this great project successfully. But it was really great on his part to have considered it anyway even though it failed.
You may other reasons to not like him, but to undermine his Telugu / Andhra idea is not right.
No, I havn't ! Must be busy licking his wounds if he shorted those stocks ;-) He will be back once some of his predictions come true..
>>> I am not surprised - you seem like a person to whom a glass being half empty is more believable than being half full.
I already spelled his vision on Andhra and Telugu. If he really had thought about using this thing against Punjabis, he could have easily made English as the 2nd language, or perhaps considered other easier / familiar NI languages for that role (Gujarati or Bengali).
It was a brief news story and I have no clue why Telugu (and not other SI language) was picked as the 2nd language. But it could also be based on Haryana's business / financial / development considerations (there was a talk of that in the article) in making Andhra its sister-city -- to expand mutual relations and development between these two states.

I'm thinking whose posts are fun. Seva's or Rashmun's.
One person imagines the "sisterhood" of Andhra and Haryana and the other dreams up small towns in Tamil nadu where the shop keepers converse in Hindi and people line up to watch Hindi movie in some unknown theatre.
One person imagines the "sisterhood" of Andhra and Haryana
>>> It was according to Haryana Govt. (Bansi Lal) at that time, as indicated in the news-media.
* Some people on this board will then promptly get to work cloning you to replace themselves thinking it's the law, before the bill gets through Parliament or gets signed by the President, but that's another story.
You can believe in anything - it's like 'fil in love-longinge'.