Barring a last minute political turnaround, Telangana will become India’s 29th State in early 2014, which may bring to an end a story whose beginnings had kick-started the first phase of state reorganisation in Independent India. Telangana will be carved out of the State of Andhra Pradesh, which had been created in 1953 by combining the Telugu-speaking areas of the erstwhile States of Hyderabad and Madras; Telangana corresponds to the area formerly in Hyderabad State. The creation of Andhra Pradesh was at the origin of movements for the formation of other states on linguistic grounds, which led to a large-scale reorganisation in 1956.

In the last couple of years, the growth and eventual success of the demand for Telangana has revived the movements for statehood in many different parts of the country. The most prominent of these are the movements for Bodoland, Gorkhaland, and Vidarbha, but there are several other demands: Koshal, Harit Pradesh, Bundelkhand, Purvanchal, Vindhya Pradesh, Kuki, Tulu Nadu, and the list goes on.

Strengthening the Indian Union

While at first glance the multiplicity of such demands — and indeed their success in Telangana and possibly elsewhere — appears to represent a further “federalisation” or “decentralisation” of the Indian polity, it in fact fits into the underlying narrative of centralisation in India. Counter-intuitively, the next “level” of political fragmentation after the initial empowerment of regional politics tends to strengthen the Indian Union. There are several reasons for this. First, the possibility of the “dismemberment” of a state threatens the very existence of its political identity, simply because this identity is co-extensive with its territory. The Centre’s power to unilaterally redefine the boundaries of a state and create new ones is not found in most other federal countries. The clearest example of a federation where the federal authority has consistently created new sub-national units is that of Nigeria (from three states to 36; however, much of this reorganisation took place under military dictatorships.

In India, Article 3 of the Constitution itself allows Parliament to alter the boundaries of a state or create new states by a simple law. There is a procedure under which the President seeks the opinion of the State Legislative Assembly on any such proposed law, but the Assembly’s recommendations are not binding.

Second, and less obvious, the movement toward general economic, cultural, and ethnic criteria for state formation, as opposed to purely linguistic criteria, represents an overall weakening of state political power.

A different centralisation Centralisation due to a political homogeneity between the Centre and the states may be termed a top-down centralisation; the same political party being in power at both levels of government is the classic example. But the era of coalition politics is now seeing a different kind of centralisation, one where national politicians are more likely to pay attention to local demands, “bypassing” the state level.

The demands for new states, even when unsuccessful, gnaw away at the influence of political actors at the state level by encouraging local politics and promoting regional elites against the state-level elite; this may be seen as a “bottom-up” form of political pressure.

Even political groups previously acting nominally in state interests are obliged to further the interests of regional groups. Linguistic identity rarely engenders political movements as powerful as those arising from a sense of ethnic/historical identity and a shared perception of economic backwardness and/or discrimination. Politicians are always bound to represent their constituencies, but the impact of this on state-level politics becomes magnified when the constituencies represented do not seek state-level action in their favour, but ask rather for a division or dismemberment of the state itself.

Statehood demands can push the process of sub-state devolution, distributing power from the state government to other administrative units. A prime example is the creation of a semi-autonomous administrative entity in the Gorkhaland region.

Central power Finally, the binary nature of federalism means that weakened states create a stronger Centre. If demands for the creation of new states succeed, the reduced size of a state has a direct impact on political equations at the Centre-state level. For example, in terms of representation in Parliament, the composition of the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha involves the attribution of seats to the states and their constituencies in proportion to their population. Smaller states get fewer seats, reducing the influence of state-level politicians. On the other hand, the possibility of new constituencies with direct Parliamentary representation is itself an incentive for local leaders to press demands for statehood.

Taken together, these dynamics create an accumulation of central power that, unlike the top-down version, draws energy from a multiplicity of local, unconnected processes in many places throughout the country. The possibility of the creation of new states and the strength of regional demands can, in themselves, be seen as contributing to a bottom-up centralisation in the federal system. The Telangana movement has revitalised these local energies, and could thus signal a new phase of this process.

(Sagar is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, New Delhi. The article is by special arrangement with the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

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