Hyderabad, January 04: AS the Union government consults political parties from across Andhra Pradesh on the 5th of January 2010, it will search for common ground on the issue of Telangana.
Whether or not a decision is arrived at quickly, the process of the creation of the new state seems to be on the horizon. The challenge will be two fold. First, in ensuring this comes about in a peaceful and law governed manner. More seriously, it will raise a larger question that needs to be faced squarely.
How many states should India have? How you answer this hinges on how you define the criteria for statehood. It also rests on how far the creation of new states reinforces rather than weakens the broader unity of India. No Indian state can actually be divided unless its own elected State Assembly passes a resolution calling for a re-division.
This is not a constitutional requirement. Unlike in the USA, the powers of the Union are extensive and far-reaching. But it has become a standard political convention since 2000.
This is convention though, it is not a constitutional imperative. It also makes eminent political sense that those who favour a breakaway have to win over consent of the state as a whole. It eases the way for settling or at least discussing disputes over water or power that often follow close on the heels of separation.
But it is essential that 21st century India rethinks core issues of the polity drawing from the last few decades, though in a critical manner.
Consensus
Nehru had a deep aversion to the linguistic principle once the country attained independence. On the 15th of December 1952 he was readying to present an outline of the First Five Year Plan when the death of the fasting Potti Sriramulu led to an outbreak of protest across the Telugu speaking region. The veteran Gandhian achieved his aim. After his death a Telugu speaking state became a certainty.
The creation of the unified Andhra Pradesh in 1956 was disputed from the start. Telangana had been a separate state from the time of accession in 1948 till the creation of the unified Telugu speaking state. For three years, the two states, Telangana and AP coexisted with Kurnool as capital of the latter. The Commission appointed by the Union government was deeply sceptical that a unified state would work, especially so for Telangana.
In hindsight it is evident that the discontent in Telangana was to strike deep roots. In 1972, a pro Telangana outfit led by Dr Chenna Reddy did well in the State Assembly polls ( despite an Indira wave) but chose to merge with her party rather than fight for the cause. Even earlier in 1969, a major wave of protests led to a political accord to respect sub regional sentiment within a unified state.
But 2010 is vastly different. It is less a case of what K Chandrasekhar Rao’s motives were, or what the Union Home Minister did or did not say. By early December 2009, no significant body of opinion in the region was publicly and openly supportive of a united Andhra Pradesh.
It was a measure of this shift in opinion that underpinned the acceptance of the idea of Telangana by virtually all political parties between two successive elections in 2004 and 2009. The strong anti- Telangana protests since December 9th have strong economic support, especially so from the industrial and real estate interests that mostly hail from the coastal districts.
But as the Congress is now aware, the current of opinion on the ground is strong enough for a dozen Members of Parliament to be ready to give up their seats unless the demand is conceded. Like their constituents they took at face value the Congress president’s campaign speeches.
After all, even the regional parties like the Telugu Desam and the Praja Rajyam had endorsed the idea in their manifestos last summer. The idea of a Telangana was discussed ad nauseum over the last six years without any major public outcry or protest.
Far reaching change in a democracy always raises the spectre of chaos. It is instructive to recall that Selig S Harrison in his India, The Most Dangerous Decades published five decades ago was sceptical that linguistic states would help hold this country together.
Of course, the idea that administrative territorial units ought not be on cultural lines won strong support of the government in the early post 1947 period. But the longer legacy of language based territorial organisation of the Congress from the Twenties was too strong to be pushed under the carpet.
Exclusivism
But the idea of language- based statehood has worked reasonably well since the Fifties. It has of course been a phenomenon with a dark underbelly. Exclusivism based on language often lurks just below the surface.
In states like Maharashtra or Gujarat social reform minded champions of language based states lost out to conservatives in the long run.
No one should doubt that Gujarati or Marathi asmita in their more fearsome forms trace their roots back to the language based identity politics.
What unified the many can now rather quickly become basis for excluding a few. Prabodhankar Thackeray, a key figure in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement was the father of the Shiv Sena founder, Balasaheb Thackeray.
Reorganisation
Having opened the Pandora’s box it is time to learn how to live with what comes out of it. The linguistic principle itself was only applied in a staggered fashion. It was Indira Gandhi who finally carried it through in the case of composite Punjab, setting aside Nehru’s instinctive distrust of a Punjabi ( read Sikh) majority state on the borders.
Even here, the plains and hill areas that spoke Hindi were hived off into separate states, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Few will today dispute that one is a showcase in social and human development while the latter is an economic powerhouse.
Yet, it had to wait for Vajpayee to rethink the internal borders in Hindi speaking India. Here, Jharkhand that had a vibrant and active social movement in the 1970s actually bore fruit; embers of the old fire survived.
Uttarakhand saw an upsurge of regional patriotism in the early 1990s but was simmering but stable when it actually got created. Yet the three new Hindi belt states gave fresh hope to sub regional demands elsewhere.
But the redrawing of the map in peninsular India now as in the Fifties will have implications for the country as a whole. Which aspirations can be accommodated via autonomy short of statehood, and which ones need go further is too vital an issue to be decided by the street. A fresh States Reorganisation Commission is the need of the hour. Its mandate must be wide ranging and it ought to elicit opinions from all quarters in a transparent manner.
But as with Nehru and the creation of Andhra, Telangana cannot be put off any longer. The larger debate has to follow and not precede its creation.
How the Centre manages this will be a test of its decisiveness as much as of its vision.
The writer teaches history in Delhi University
—Agencies