Interrogating Reorganisation

of States
Interrogating Reorganisation
of States<br/>

Culture, Identity and Politics in India

Editors<br/>
Asha Sarangi<br/>
Sudha Pai
First published 2011 in India
by Routledge<br/>
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© 2011 Asha Sarangi and Sudha Pai

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ISBN: 978-0-415-68558-0
 Contents

Foreword by B. G. Verghese vii

Acknowledgements xxiii

1
Introduction: Contextualising Reorganisation

Part I
Historical and Political Context of Reorganisation

1. Nehru and the Reorganisation of States:

Making of Political India 29

2. Rule, Governmental Rationality and Reorganisation

of States 48

Part II
Reorganising the Hindi Heartland
3. 'Making of a Political Community': The Congress Party
and theIntegration of Madhya Pradesh 69

4. Reorganising the Hindi Heartland in 2000: The Deep

Regional Politics of State Formation 107

Part III
Languages and States: Western and Southern India

5. The Paradox of a Linguistic Minority 129

6. Political Currents in Maharashtra: Language and Beyond 144

 7. Discourses on Telangana and Critique of the Linguistic
Nationality Principle 164

8.Competing Imaginations: Language and Anti-colonial

Nationalism in India 190

Part IV
Culture and Identity: Reorganisation in
the East and the North East

9. Revisiting the States Reorganisation Commission

in the Context of Orissa 211

10. 'Linguistic Provinces' to 'Homelands': Shifting

Paradigms of State-making in Post-colonial India 249

11. Assam through the Prism of Reorganisation Experience 282

About the Editors 304

Notes on Contributors 305
Index 309
 Foreword*

B. G. Verghese

When we talk about the states, one thing that primarily springs to
our mind is the territorial aspect. However, India is not a territorial
expression — it is an idea, a tradition and, lest we forget, an aspiration.
It is a civilisational concept. Mere geography does not tell us what
India is about. The reorganisation of states focused on the territorial
aspects. However, we cannot ignore the other and more important
axis representing the people of India. The idea of India is encapsulated
in the Preamble to the Constitution which, though seldom read or
remembered, enshrines the heart and soul of the constitution. It says
‘We, the People’, the most diverse set of people in the world.
The Anthropological Survey of India’s ‘Peoples of India Study’
under Kunwar Suresh Singh some years ago enumerated 4,635
communities;13,156 clans; 91 eco-cultural zones and represented in this
broad set of communities all major types of sects, cults, castes and tribes
of the country. These communities are dynamic. They are moving
both through space and, as importantly, through time. Hence there
is no one clear, constant and territorial definition of India which is
possible. The Indian ideal was Vasudeva Kutumbakam, i.e., the world is
a family — an early concept of globalisation which, contrary to given
wisdom, was always part of the Indian tradition and not alien to it. It
was only the interruption of the western colonial world that instead
of connecting all colonies, like spokes in a wheel, to the metropolitan
power in Europe, separated India from the rest of the world. The
rise of the nation–state, a relatively new phenomenon, was based on
language more than religion. This is sot surprising as language is a
more powerful and older identity marker than religion, encoding as
it does the history and culture of people.
In terms of nationalism, modern India is a compendium of states
or, as some scholars prefer to call it, a state–nation rather than a single
nation–state. The Preamble to the Constitution again refers to ‘India,
that is Bharat’. What is Bharat? It is not a territorial concept but cultural
or civilisational one, embodying traditions, values and aspirations. The
Constitution goes on to state that ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union
 * Interrogating Reorganisation of States

of States.’ States are building blocks whose contours and content have
kept changing. The Gandhian ideal of a decentralised state structure
based on the principle of subsidiarity had to be abandoned because
of the exigencies of partition. Instead, we opted for a relatively strong
centre, reinforced by planning, financial levers and a range of controls
that invaded the states’ domain.
Until 1967, the single-party dominance of the Congress itself
shaped constitutional practice. Parts of the Constitution remained
in animated suspension as reference was quite often made not to the
Constitution or the courts but to the party for resolution of issues
in contention. The Congress Working Committee was the supreme
arbiter. Panchayati Raj, another Gandhian ideal, fell victim to the
same process of centralisation though a gesture was made through a
reference in the Directive Principles of State Policy. In pursuance of
that, ‘democratic decentralisation’ was introduced in 1959 through an
administrative fiat. That failed. If power brokers in Delhi were chary
of devolving power to the states, Members of Legislative Assembly
(MLAs) likewise declined to part with power to the districts and lower
echelons. However, Panchayati Raj, including a municipal component,
was enacted as part of the Constitution in 1992, ushering in a third
tier of government.
It is sometimes said that states’ rights were always illusory because
Article 3 provides for the formation by Parliament of new states and
alteration of the area, boundaries and names of existing states. So,
the argument goes, there is nothing sacrosanct about states or states’
rights because the centre can change all of that by whim and fancy.
Such an interpretation would be misleading as Article 3 was
essentially
intended to accommodate the impulses of growth and change
and to permit the integration of princely states. A third of undivided
India and over 40 per cent of the Indian Union that came into being
consisted of princely states, large and small, scattered all over the
place. Flexibility was necessary in order to accommodate them in an
evolving structure. The process went through many phases, even prior
to reorganisation of states.
The present order can be traced to the Mughal and other subas
(provinces) and earlier janapaads (autonomous principalities). The
British established provinces by conquest, as a matter of military and
administrative convenience. The only concession to language that they
made was the creation of Orissa and Sind in 1937. 1 The Congress,
however, had promised linguistic reorganisation in the early 1920s and
since then, the establishment of the provincial Congress Committees
 Foreword *

were based on linguistic identities. We had the Karnataka Pradesh

Congress Committee (PCC) the Kerala PCC, the Utkal PCC and so
on. Inevitably therefore, with the coming of independence there was
pressure to fulfill earlier promises and the formation of Andhra was
pressed. There were resistance, but it was conceded following the death
through fasting of Potti Sriramulu. This was followed by the setting up
of the States’ Reorganisation Commission (SRC). Further, the SRC’s
report in 1956 was in a way advise to change the map of India. Assam,
Bombay Presidency and post-partition united Punjab were left alone.
This led to several agitations. Maharashtra and Gujarat, demanded
separate statehood and after intense struggle, they were finally able to
succeed. Later, Haryana, Himachal and Punjab came into being and
Assam gave birth to a number of hill/tribal states. The demand for
a Punjabi suba was unwisely resisted on mistaken premises causing a
linguistic demand to take on communal overtones, aggravated by a
battle over whether the script should be Devnagari or Gurmukhi. In
the process, the traditionally used Urdu script was abandoned.
Earlier, during the framing of the Constitution, there was a bitter
battle over what should be the official language — Hindi or Hindustani.
Unfortunately, Urdu got sidelined and Hindustani sadly lost to Hindi
by a single vote in the Congress Parliamentary Party. The south and
Bengal took up cudgels against what they termed Hindi imperialism.
According to Article 351, Hindi was required to evolve by
incorporating
words and idiomatic expressions from Hindustani, Urdu and all
the other languages of India. This direction was unfortunately ignored
in official thinking. Fortunately, this was not the case in respect of
the bazaar. The bazaar spoke the language the people spoke and
Bollywood embraced and embellished the trend. The Official Language
gave us a rather stilted, Sanskritised Hindi. Curiously, despite the
emotions aroused by the language issue, the country never gave itself
a coherent language policy. This appears extraordinary for a polyglot
society trying to build a new nationhood.
For years, barring the effects of a certain Bhargava, there was no
worthwhile Hindi–English bilingual dictionary.2 Interlanguage
translations
were minimal, simultaneous translation a rarity and there
was no effort to promote basic vocabularies and publish books to
promote rapid language learning. 3 Standard keyboards were not
developed. Hindustan Teleprinters Ltd was granted a monopoly
and initially manufactured only Roman typewriters and teleprinters
and, later, Devnagari keyboards. Working in The Times of India,
Delhi, I found that copies of our Hindi and Marathi editions were
keyed in Roman and transmitted to our Mumbai office. These were
later transliterated there into Hindi and Marathi. In the process,
comprehension and style were lost.
There were great tensions in Tamil Nadu and the south generally
and in Bengal over official language and language policy. A huge and
totally meaningless fuss was made over incorporating certain languages
in the Sixth Schedule and there is now a rising controversy over some
languages such as Tamil being declared ‘classical’ to the exclusion
of others, like Malayalam. Moreover, it is tragic that even today, we
have the most inadequate language policy — something so vital to the
concept of nation building, cultural bonding and togetherness.
Assam and the north-east of India saw other kinds of tensions.
Assam witnessed anti-Bengali riots. Later, minority tribal groups
within Assam rose up against Assamese ‘chauvinism’. Within these
groups, further tensions developed with the rise of identity politics.
Smaller communities demanded that their linguistic and other rights
be recognised. It is noteworthy that in Assam, identity politics is
nurtured
by Sahitya Sabhas. If you do not have a Sahitya Sabha, you
essentially do not exist. So every community has a Sahitya Sabha
which has written the political agenda and provided the basis for
agitations for linguistic and script recognition and cultural rights.
Having drawn a new political map based largely, though not
entirely,
on language, the SRC recommended a three-language formula so
that people learnt the state language/mother tongue, Hindi or another
modern Indian language and English. This formula was, however,
never well implemented. The office of the Commissioner for Linguistic
Minorities that was instituted to carry out the task proved to be a weak
instrument with a vague mandate. English, however, was adopted as
the country’s associated official language, virtually for all time. The
SRC also recommended the establishment of five Zonal Councils
— North, South, East, West and North-Eastern — to bring together
states within a given region for purposes of mutual cooperation and
coordination. This was a useful institutional mechanism but
unfortunately
it fell by the wayside after some time. It merits revival.
The linguistic reorganisation of states has had its critics. Jawaharlal
Nehru was earlier for linguistic states but later changed his mind as
he feared this would foster local nationalisms and breed parochialism
and come in the way of national unity. He deplored the break up of
Hyderabad. He was wrong because it was surely necessary to bring
the administration nearer to the people so as to facilitate participative
governance. The absence of a language policy, however, defeated this
larger objective to some extent.
The north-east experienced a different trajectory. At the centre, there
was an understandable desire to ensure the rapid integration of these
peripheral areas and peoples into the Indian union. On the other hand,
the tribal populations who had earlier been confined to what were
termed partially and totally ‘excluded areas’ — that is, excluded from
provincial governance to remain directly under the Viceroy — wanted
time to understand what was happening and where they were being
placed and what all this might mean for them and their aspirations.
So while the tribes wanted time to adjust, metropolitan India, as in
Burma, China and Thailand, raced to fill the vacuum between the
inner, administrative frontier and the outer, political frontier so as
to define and consolidate the political boundaries of the new state.
Nevertheless, the Indian state failed again to develop a border policy.
Boundaries are important, but the fact of a boundary is less important
than its nature — whether as a barrier or a bridge. Boundaries are fixed
lines; borders are transition zones involving people, commerce,
culture,
the environment, natural resources and so on. In the absence
of a border policy, the government left these as wilderness areas as a
defense stratagem. Territory was placed above people. Strangely, in
post-partition undivided Punjab, border policy dictated that no large
industry should be established there so that they remained beyond
the mischief of Pakistani military incursions. Therefore, other than
the Nangal Fertiliser plant, no large industry was set up. Small
industries and Bhakra were all right. Safety for large industry lay in
being located deep within the Indian heartland.
The departing British or some of their key officials thought of hiving
off parts of the tribal belt in the north-east of the country and Burma
to form one or more Crown colonies — semi-Christian entities that
might decide their future later. The idea was incorporated in a so-called
Coupland Plan. The Mizos and Nagas alike turned this down. They
preferred to remain with India and negotiate their future status with
the new Indian government. It is interesting to recall this fragment of
history. The future of the tribals of north-east of India and questions
of identity, culture, customary law and way of life were remitted to a
special committee of the Constituent Assembly. The result was the
Sixth Schedule, applicable to the former ‘excluded areas’ in the
north-east of the country. The Fifth Schedule was similarly fashioned
for the rest of tribal India — an area much larger in extent and
population than the north-east of India. This later charter was in 1995
further reinforced by the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act,
(PESA). Taken together, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules constitute a
constitution within Constitution for the tribals of India.
Though written into the Constitution, most policy makers within
the central and state government, the legislatures and the
bureaucracy,
have turned a blind eye towards it. Implementation has been
poor and faltering or totally absent in some respects. Governors have
overriding constitutional powers over state governments in ensuring
implementation of the Fifth Schedule and PESA. They are required
to make annual reports to the President regarding the administration
of these areas as the Constitution provides that ‘the executive power
of the Union shall extend to the giving of directions to the State….’
However, only few governors have discharged this responsibility and
the fact remains that they are not well equipped to do so. Parliament
does not get the annual reports regularly and those sent are often
perfunctory in content and are simply not debated. It is a travesty that a
solemn social contract with tribal India, embodied in the Constitution,
has been systematically rubbished in practice by the state over the years
to this day. Still sadder is the fact that the parliamentary spokesmen
of the victims, the tribal MPs (Members of Parliament) and MLAs,
have been unwilling (if co-opted), rather unable to protest. The
willful
disregard of the ‘dignity of the individual’, a patent constitutional
failure, has engendered cynicism and anger and thus sometimes leads
to violence in the form of Naxalism. The answer to Naxalism therefore
lies in looking at the promises made in the Constitution and working
the salutary provisions made therein for the governance and the
welfare
of these disadvantaged and neglected segments of our population,
rather than treating it as a mere law and order problem.
If we now turn to what is seen as secessionism and insurgency in
the north-east of the country, three strands are discernible. Initially,
only a section of the Nagas, organised under the banner of the Naga
Nationalist Organisation, maintained even prior to independence
that the Nagas were never a part of India. The argument ran that the
British, having conquered India as well as the Naga people, brought
them under a single administration as a matter of convenience in the
same manner as Burma was tagged on to India (until 1937). Thus, with
the departure of the British, both Indians and Nagas regained their
freedom and should live as good neighbours. However, this was not
something the Indian union understood or ever accepted. Discussion
brought about a partial resolution but a secessionist element continued
with armed struggle. However, the dialogue was resumed and with
several rounds of talks and with a ‘cessation of hostilities’ agreement
in place, the differences have greatly narrowed. This has now left over
only some residual matters that are capable of a just and honourable
settlement.
The Mizos opted for India but a section later somehow felt
aggrievedand opted to secede, going underground under the banner
of the Mizo National Front. A change of heart led to negotiations
ending in a settlement and erstwhile rebels assuming the reins of
democratic governance. Subsequently other tribal groups elsewhere
in the north-east of the country decided to tread the secessionist path for
less than obvious reasons, some of which, like The United Liberation
Front of Asom (ULFA) in Assam, were largely adventurist. Some
sections in Manipur and Tripura were, however, aggrieved that
integration with (not accession to) India had been forced and hence
demanded a reversion to sovereignty. None of these groups are very
clear as to what they mean by ‘sovereignty’ as they are essentially
equal partners and rulers in the Indian commonwealth and their
‘peoplehood’ has been and can be amply safeguarded in a variety
of autonomous structures making for self-determination within the
Indian union.
Sovereignty or leaving secessionist movements apart, other
movements
have essentially sought separation from Assam and Assamese
domination. Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal fall in this category.
Made up of hill tribals, they started seeking a dispensation of their own,
going over and beyond the protection of the Sixth Schedule. However,
once these units were formed, smaller ethnic groups within them joined
with the hill people in the struggle against Assamese hegemony asking
protection against the new overlords. Hence, there grew a demand for
development councils, regional councils and autonomous councils for
Chakmas, Karbis, Bodos and so forth and for non-territorial ‘apex
councils’ for smaller scattered plain tribals like the Rabhas, Tiwas,
Mishings and Sonawals within Assam, Tripura and Mizoram. This
is a continuing process. Yet closure must be applied at some stage, or
else fragmentation could produce political incoherence and impede
development.4
Another kind of problem arose in Tripura whose ruling tribal
population
was reduced to a minority as a result of tidal wave of Bengali
settlers and refugees. Sikkim felt similarly threatened by a Nepalese
influx and sought safeguards in weighted preferences for ‘indigenous
state subjects’, namely the Bhutias and Lepchas who are of Buddhist
Tibetan stock. There has also been an assertion of ethnic identity
markers in movements for the revival of ancient languages, scripts
and faiths: Kok Borok in Tripura, Sanamahi in the Imphal Valley
and the Seng Khasi affirmation in Meghalaya. Roman has sometimes
been preferred to Devnagari as a means of differentiation. Now these
tendencies do not represent separatist movements but exemplify
processes of self-discovery that have wisely been accommodated
without getting unduly worried by such trends. The moment a
demand of this kind is denied, it assumes huge agitational importance.
Conceding the demand and those seeking the concession will be unsure
if they are really going to benefit. So the ability to say ‘yes’ is a part of
the process of state formation.
With the spread of education and communications, migration,
globalisation and rising social consciousness, the underclass and
deprived sections within the Indian population pyramid started getting
empowered. This empowerment started getting manifested,
increasingly,
in the phenomena of identity assertion. Initially formed around
local tribal, caste, language, religious and regional affiliations, this led
to a built up of a process of making larger social coalitions by
affiliation
to kinship or kindred groups elsewhere. This was happening all
over the country and certainly in the north-east of India too. However,
the Naga nationalism and the demand for a larger ‘Nagalim’ still could
not invent the bond of a single, unifying language.5
We sometimes get troubled when in the process of evolution of
identity formations, communities keep enlarging and amending their
demands. This does not signify any inherent perversity as much as
a manifestation of maturation with the process of self-discovery and
the evolution of their world-view. These issues go beyond territory to
encompass culture and rising aspirations. As before, if we have the
ability to say ‘yes’, we will be able to manage these attributes of
diversity
and change with greater success. Opposition begets mistrust and
tensions such as has occurred when demands for inclusion of certain
languages in the Eighth Schedule have been rejected. Why should
there have been a problem in including Nepalese or Manipuri in the
Eighth Schedule? All this entails is the publication of official gazette
notifications in these languages and the right to write the Union
Public Service Commission (UPSC) examinations in them. Given
the latter right, not too many might exercise it as they realise that they
are not going to advance their careers or their prospects unless they
are familiar with more widely used languages or a world language that
offers better access to information and knowledge.
In the process of local identity or sub-national assertion, as for
instanceamong the Bodos, past and present are seen to clash. The Bodos
were once the largest tribe on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, the
rulers, the most indigenous among the indegenes, but are now scattered
and reduced to a minority with resettlement of displaced persons in
and migration into their homeland, development and other factors.
So they demanded a self-governing Bodo Territorial Council within
their traditional homeland. However, when the council area was
defined after much bargaining, it was discovered that only about 38 per
cent of the population was Bodo, making them the ‘ruling minority’,
a situation resented by others who, though more numerous, were
now reduced to a ‘subject people’. An answer has been sought to be
found by assuring the cultural rights of all these other groups. In the
case of Rabhas, Tiwas, Mishings and Sonawals, an ingenious non-
territorial concept has been fashioned to safeguard the development
and cultural rights of non-contiguous plains tribal groups whose habitat
has been interpenetrated by others. So we have a highly complex and
evolving situation that calls for understanding, flexibility and political
innovation in fashioning institutions and structures that can provide
satisfaction in the course of nation building and social maturation. For
many ‘younger members’ of the Indian family who are in a process of
becoming, ‘India’ lies in the future.
In all of this, Arunachal stands out. It is truly an extraordinary story
that has gone unnoticed. I am no anthropologist, but from my limited
knowledge I find no parallel between the success achieved there and
anything else in any part of the world. It is mosaic of over 110 very
diverse tribes of varied racial and linguistic stock, each numbering
from a few hundreds to a few tens of thousands, speaking different
languages, professing different faiths (indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu,
Christian) coming together through a process of nation-building and
state-building to acquire a new sense of identity as Arunachalese
Indians. Arunachal continues to evolve and so we cannot sit back
smugly but must use the existing platform for its further evolution on
positive lines.
What about the future? In any consideration of reorganisation
and centre–state relations, there is a third dimension that cannot be
ignored, namely, federalism. Initially states’ rights were limited by the
regulatory powers of the centre through planning, finance, the conduct
of international trade, licensing and a variety of controls. However,
after 1990, with deregulation, economic reforms and indicative
planning
at home and with growing globalisation, market mechanisms
and international financial, trade, environmental and other protocols
have taken a centre stage. Deregulation has gone some way towards
restoringstates’ rights without anyone necessarily doing anything about
it. The government’s role is set to decline further with increased market
dependency, outsourcing of many governmental functions, the rise of
civil society, an enhanced role for NGOs and greater transparency with
the right to information. Information has traditionally been a major
source of state power as information is power. However in the new
dispensation, with greater transparency and participation, state power
has diminished while peoples’ power has been augmented.
Likewise, international conventions and standards of various kinds
will increasingly erode national sovereignty. One can already sense the
impact of global conventions on labour standards, bonded labour, child
labour, green labelling, gender budgeting and so on. All these matters
entail compliance with international standards and go beyond the lines
drawn in national laws and the constitution. Increased environmental
and climate concerns stress generational and future rights and enhance
the salience of the commons. We are therefore in a state of evolution
and cannot remain unaffected by international trends because this is
the world in which we live.
Some special issues merit attention. The National Socialist Council
of Nagaland (IM) is for instance demanding Nagalian, or a greater
Naga state. This is not a ‘reorganisation’ that can be unilaterally
imposed and would require the consent of other parties and states
if civil strife is to be avoided as was earlier experienced in Manipur.
This is where a non-territorial solution offers a way out. It would
be entirely consistent with constitutional and political proprieties
to delineate a larger Naga-inhabited area where the customary laws,
language, educational system and Naga way of life and other rights
are protected through a cooperative structuring of these
relationships
across states. At the political level, there is already a Naga Hoho
at the apex of the individual Naga ho-hos or tribal assemblies, going
across all the Naga-inhabited regions in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam
and Arunachal and into Myanmar. This has met from time to time in
recent years to consult on pan-Naga issues. So it is possible to structure
a non-territorial Naga entity or collective peoplehood if we look at
this in a socio-cultural context and have the ability to say, ‘yes’. Such
acquiescence would most likely diminish the intensity of the demand
and make people more rational than emotional in judging where
their interests lie. There should be no difficulty if, as proposed in the
course of the current Naga dialogue with the Government of India,
the Naga political formations look at the Indian Constitution and state
what they would like to add or subtract. The consensual agreement
arrived at could then be incorporated in a ‘Naga constitution’ within
the Indian Constitution through an elaboration of the existing Article
371A. The alternative would be to frame a separate Naga constitution
and forge an organic link between it and the Indian Constitution as in
the case of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) constitution. None of this
will mean separation from India and a non-territorial entity will not
entail further territorial reorganisation of the north-east of the country.
It would mean accommodating things in a different way.
None need cavil at this. A drastic amendment to the concept of
the Indian state and Constitution took place in 1973 when, between
breakfast and lunch, the Lok Sabha converted India into a
confederation
by incorporating Sikkim, a protectorate outside the Indian union,
as an associate state. It was to be represented in the Indian Parliament
without India formally gaining any corresponding constitutional rights
over that principality. It is another matter that Sikkim was soon after
fully integrated into the union.
We do not have to worry about granting a new Naga entity its
own flag, currency, or postage. Many Indian princely states of yore
had their own stamps, coins and flags. This did not add anything to
their ‘sovereignty’. The princely states were more subject to British
dominion than were the British provinces. Their gun-salutes were a
concession to vanity — no more.
The same issue has cropped up in J&K. The Prime Minister
Dr Manmohan Singh, in concert with the former Pakistan President
General Pervez Musharraf, had decided on a soft border dividing
the two halves of the state. There was to be no redrawing of boundaries.
Instead, what was proposed was the establishment of trans-border
institutions for trade, tourism and other cooperative relationships, not
excluding the joint development and management of the Indus rivers
as provided for under the Indus Waters Treaty.6 What is envisaged
in J&K is the evolution of something akin to a confederation or
condominium across the Line of Control (LOC) without derogation of
the sovereignty of the two states over their part currently administered
by them. This is not a novel proposition. Jawaharlal Nehru hinted at
a J&K confederation in 1964 and sent Sheikh Abdullah to Pakistan to
discuss the matter further. The death of Nehru interrupted the process,
though the then President of Pakistan Ayub Khan was not initially
inclined to favour the idea.7
There have been periodic demands for new and smaller states.
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal were formed recently and
Telengana and Vidharba are in the queue and there is a demand to
break Uttar Pradesh (UP) into three states. There is no reason to
resist the demand for more states subject to their techno-economic
and administrative viability. There is no wrong in envisaging India
at 2040–2050 with a population of around 1,600 million organised in
60 states, with an average population of 25 million each, and some
1,500 districts. At the base, there could be 15,000 development blocks,
each with a population of around 100,000 governed by structures
of local self-government through gram sabhas (village councils),
panchayat samitis ( a grouping of village councils at the block level
comprising about 100–120 villages) and zila parishads (an aggregation
of panchayat samitis at the district level, i.e., district council). There
is a certain optimum management span which could further shrink
in certain fields or at certain levels as life becomes more complex and
participative.
Some might argue that such a multiplication of units of governance
could be very expensive. However, the breaking of heads and burning
of buses, which seems to be a national pastime whenever anyone gets
a fit of anger, is obviously much more expensive, quite apart from the
incompetence and inefficiency that sometimes comes with oversized
units. Uttar Pradesh is ungovernable. So there is much to be said
for smaller and more manageable units. However, alongside such
fragmentation, it would be desirable to establish larger non-political
entities like natural resource regions, river basin authorities, transport
corridors, economic hubs, regional energy grids and agro-climatic
zones in order to encourage functional coordination over and beyond
zonal councils. The North-Eastern Council must in particular be
revamped so that it becomes an empowered body for regional and
geo-strategic planning.
The counter argument is that smaller units may not be viable and
could breed localism and parochialism. However, sons of the soil
chauvinism has been witnessed even in large states like Maharashtra.
Yet Malaysia, whose Bhumiputra policy favours Malay sons of the soil
as against the immigrant Chinese and Indian communities, is
beginning
to outgrow this in some ways as its booming economy begins to
place increasing value on meritocracy so that it remains competitive
in a globalising economy. That could be the antidote.
Trans-state and trans-border migration on account of both push and
pull factors is also affecting political geography. The poverty belt of
eastern India is emptying into the more prosperous regions of
northwestern,
western and southern India in search of work and opportunity.
Differential population growth across states is also giving rise to new
political disparities in consequence of the periodic re-delimitation of
constituencies on the basis of changing population figures.
A close look again at our cities makes our argument more clear.
The metro cities are becoming ever more cosmopolitan. Matunga in
Mumbai is probably the fifth largest Tamil-speaking city in the country
and Delhi’s Chittaranajn Park is a huge Bengali city. Furthermore,
people are getting more inter-culturally exposed through marriage,
education and domicile. India is changing and the mixing and churning
going on is creating new identities and dissolving old ones.
So what we need is to create more and more examples like city
states. We have a National Capital Region and there are greater
metropolitan
regions around Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and
Hyderabad with their own authorities. These are all conglomerates
of 15 to 20 million people or more, and growing. They have
outgrownolder municipal structures and need to be empowered while
taking care to retain a certain urban–rural nexus. In addition to states
and lower order units of governance, we now have to factor in a
new entity — mega corporates like Tata, Reliance, Oil and Natural
Gas Commission (ONGC) and the State Bank of India (SBI), which
dispose of more wealth than the GDP of all but the largest states in the
country. They constitute vast repositories of technology, manpower,
management skills and natural resources. The state has to ally with
these bodies and we need to foster a new concept of corporate social
responsibility for development and welfare through constructive
public–private–peoples partnerships.
States’ rights are being reviewed by a new centre–state Commission.
We must invigorate Fifth Schedule governance, promote gender
equity and maybe enlarge legislatures with genderised proportional
representation. The size of the Lok Sabha merits increase by at least
250 members. This component could well be elected by proportional
representation with a stipulation that up to 200 members of the larger
House shall be women, whether directly elected or coming through
the List.
 A Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is another necessary but much
misunderstood
concept. A UCC does not entail the abrogation of personal
laws, which do however require codification. Few seem to be aware
that Goa has a UCC, a legacy of Portuguese rule. Similarly, we have
the Special Marriage Act which provides for a uniform code that
has facilitated interfaith and inter-community marriage. However,
there should be similar uniform civil laws or family laws for divorce,
maintenance, succession and adoption, which at present are lacking.
In the absence of a UCC, citizens are in effect being denied the right to
be Indian but are in a sense condemned only to rise to membership of
a particular faith, caste, community or sub-community, to be governed
by Khaps (caste panchayats), and other traditional denominational
bodies, many of them antiquated. Building unity out of diversity in civil
society requires a uniform code. This will also make for fraternity, one
of the richest words in the Constitution but, alas forgotten. It has been
mistakenly displaced by the admittedly important notion of secularism,
which in turn has been increasingly hollowed out by vote-bank politics.
The idea of minority must connote more than mere numbers. To talk
of 150 million Muslims, a number almost as large as the entire Arab
world, is surely an absurdity. The Canadians refer to their miniscule
Inuit (Eskimo) population as the second nation. Being a minority is
more truly an attitude than belonging to a less numerous community
than the ‘majority’. By relating minorities to numbers and vote banks,
we segregate them in boxes labelled ‘we’ and ‘them’. Attitudes however
do change with empowerment and education.
Language has to be seen both as a vehicle of commerce and of
culture. The Imphal service of the All India Radio (AIR), for instance,
broadcasts in eight or more languages, catering to the varied culture
of its listeners. People will naturally learn their mother tongue and
whatever language opens their door to opportunity. However, man
does not live by bread alone. Literature, poetry, song and drama are
no less important and have inspirational value. These too must be
kept alive.8
There are many interfaces in our society where Bharat confronts or
is juxtaposed against India. A shining India living besides a suffering
India will not endure. Growth and dignity must march together. Much
of the violence we see around us is because of the indignity inflicted on
our own people. Nevertheless, India is evolving both as a geopolitical
construct and a people-centric commonwealth. Every year millions
of Indians graduate from Bharatiya to Indian. This upwelling from
below represents the country’s emerging diversity from a long, silent,
submissive, oppressed submerged under-mass into the sunlight of a
modernising, democratic, inclusive India struggling to build an equal
citizenship. These cohorts of ‘new Indians’ oftentimes proclaim their
identity and assert their rights through new political formations that
keep bubbling up, merging with kindred interest groups and then
disappearing when their task is done. This explains the multitude
of political parties jostling for leverage or power at the centre and
in the states. This may be untidy and incoherent but is not therefore
to be despised. This truly represents India. Coalition governments
in turn have made for more consensual politics based on common
minimum programmes and have helped empower states’ rights through
consultative processes. This is not weakness but strength.
Many yearn for the ‘good old days’ of Nehru and now fear that the
centre is falling apart. However, I argue, quite the contrary. Jawaharlal
Nehru ruled a small India with a big Bharat that scarcely mattered.
The House of the People was more truly a House of Elites and it is
only now that we get to see a Lok Sabha. Despite the dust and din,
indiscipline and failings, Indian democracy is today far stronger, more
stable and has deeper roots than before, though, we have yet to go a
long way. The complete merger of Bharat into India may take several
more decades, but those who have been waiting in a non-existent queue
for thousand years will not be denied and will certainly get their due.
The anger and impatience we see around us represents a storehouse of
great energy for positive and potential good in nation building, if we
accept this and have the ability to say, ‘yes’ at the right time. We must
build on our strengths and not lament our weaknesses. They will be
overcome. So I conclude with two theorems. First, India’s unity rests
on its respect for diversity, which embodies great strength, a rare beauty
and immense hybrid vigour. Next, India’s stability depends on change.
The process of becoming more fully India has an aspirational aspect
which is as important for the future as the time and space dimensions
of nation building. So the reorganisation of states has to be seen as a
three-dimensional task and a great work in progress.

Notes
* This is the inaugural address given at a seminar organised at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, on 25 September 2008.
1. Burma, which was tagged on to India for administrative purposes, was
also separated at that time.
2. I used to make it a point to go to all major book fairs in Delhi year after
year to measure progress in this field. I found all manner of bilingual
lexicons — Hindi–Portuguese, Hindi–Japanese or whatever, but no
new and improved Hindi–English editions, let alone Hindi–Bengali,
Hindi–Tamil, Malayalam–Bengali or Telugu–Oriya dictionaries. Indeed,
linguistic illiteracy marked language policy.
3. It still remains easier to learn French or German in India today that any
Indian language outside of some schools.
4. The concept of non-territorial councils is very interesting. However, it
seems to be little known or understood, though it offers a solution for a
great many problems. Nor is it a foreign concept. It is enshrined in the
Constitution and we have operationalised it in the working of upper houses
in state legislatures.
5. There were about 36 or so different Naga dialects and the lingua franca,
Nagamese, a pidgin language with Assamese at its core, seasoned with
a smattering of various Naga, Bengali, Hindi and English words being
written in the Roman script.
6. Having reached the limits of what we can do with the partitioned flows
of the Indus, the treaty provides for ‘future cooperation’. With climate
change, the entire hydrology of the Indus system and the climatic conditions
affecting it is undergoing change. Therefore, unless we operate on this axis
swiftly and with understanding, both countries could be in serious trouble.
7. Between Nepal and India, both sovereign countries, we have an open
border. It is a unique relationship that possibly does not exist anywhere
else in the world. Indian currency can be used in Nepal. Nepalese can buy
land, freely migrate to India, take up jobs and do business here and join the
Indian Army. We also have in the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC), a regional union on the pattern of the European
Union, Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). SAARC’s vision is to build
an Asian community with a common currency. The dates suggested for
various milestones may have receded, but the ideal is there. We are also a
member of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and
Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) and the Mekong–Ganga Association
with countries further east.
8. Public Service Broadcasting (PBS) was intended to serve this and a host
of other social purposes. Tragically, Prasar Bharati has been systemically
throttled. Private commercial broadcasters understandably cater to the
consumer who can buy the products and services advertised. There is
nothing inherently wrong in this; but at our present stage of development,
the commercial broadcaster, being market driven, essentially caters to the
consumer whereas the not-for-profit PBS is well placed to serve the citizen.
All consumers are citizens, but not all citizens are consumers, living as they
do below or just above the poverty line.
 Acknowledgement

The essays in this volume were initially presented in a seminar

organised at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi on
25–26 September 2008. The Seminar was jointly organised by Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library and the SAP/UGC of the Centre for
Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The editors
are grateful to Prof Mridula Mukherjee, Director, Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library for her encouragement and support without
which this seminar would not have been possible. We appreciate the
sincere efforts of staff members at the Nehru Memorial in organising
the seminar and ensuring that it was a success. In particular, we would
like to thank the contributors who kept with the deadlines and went
beyond the call of duty to revise their papers on time and thus made this
volume possible. We appreciate the efforts put in by Professors Usha
Thakkar and Nagindas Sanghavi for writing a paper on Maharashtra
especially for this volume. Our colleagues at the Centre for Political
Studies participated with enthusiasm in the seminar and gave their
critical inputs and suggestions. We would like to acknowledge the
support
of Prof. Balveer Arora, then Director of SAP/UGC at the Centre
for Political Studies in giving his valuable advice for organising the
seminar. Finally we would like to thank the team at Routledge for
their patient and efficient handling of this volume.

Asha Sarangi and Sudha Pai

 Introduction:
Contextualising Reorganisation

Asha Sarangi and Sudha Pai

The creation of three new states in the year 2000 has continued to
draw scholarly attention to the pragmatic rationale and political
viability
of the demand for smaller states emerging in different parts of
the country. The political process underlying it has been questioned
and debated over in the last one decade. Whether or not the rationale
of reorganisation was democratically initiated and pursued or it was
simply a case of political strategy and expediency can only be
ascertained
by analysing various reasons responsible for redrawing the state
boundaries and their territorial jurisdictions. The present demand for
Telangana statehood can be better understood in view of the earlier
processes of reorganisation carried out periodically at various stages
since the 1956 when the first phase of reorganisation of states began.
The current proposal for setting up the Second States Reorganisation
needs to evaluate, first of all, a more comprehensive view of various
phases of reorganisation and their subsequent consequences affecting
the political economy of development of different states and regions
in independent India. The recommendations of the States Reorgan-
isation Commission (SRC) in 1956 were taken into account, though
partially, while initiating the process of territorial re-demarcation of
the country following broader principles of geolinguistic contiguity,
economic efficiency, political unity and regional coherence and
integrity.
The newly installed federal institutional structure began to be
evaluated within the larger social and political compulsions arising
out of the cultural–linguistic remapping of the country. As a result of
it, the initial federal design began to be recast gradually keeping in
view the needs of cultural heterogeneity, social mobility, geopolitical
contiguity, linguistic homogeneity and administrative–bureaucratic
rationality of the state immediately after independence. The thick
process of reorganisation shows the significance of understanding
dense interlinkages in the contested relationship between language,
 Interrogating Reorganisation of States

culture, region and the state, and their overlapping hierarchical

settings
weaving into the formation of states in independent India. In this
regard, institutional and political embedding of culture was more in
terms of its relational attributes identified as language, region, history
or social spheres of various groups and collectives establishing some
kind of inter-individual and inter-group relationships. The state-
building exercise could not be completed without integrating this
diverse cultural order of the day.
This volume aims at engaging critically with some of the central
themes and concerns that have been crucial to such a process of
reorganisation in the last 50 years. The essays included in this volume
interrogate principles underlying the process of reorganisation both in
historical and contemporary contexts, and provide framework for a
prospective thinking over the contested relationship between language,
region, politics, culture and state. These essays suggest various nuances
and reasons which contribute to the state-building exercise on the one
hand, and the continuous assertion of the demand for smaller states
on the part of various regions and sub-regions included in the existing
larger states on the other.
While mapping out the historical trajectory of events leading to
the states reorganisation process culminating in the formation of 14
states and nine union territories, it is necessary to understand the long
span of the reorganisation through at least four distinct phases of it.
Each of these phases has witnessed a complex play among various
factors responsible for shaping the discourses of reorganisation in the
subsequent decades. We identify these four phases as; colonial state
and its intervention, nationalist movement and the early signs of
reorganisation, SRC and the states reorganisation after independence
and the demand for smaller states in contemporary India.
Colonial State and its Interventions
The existence of numerous regions and sub-regions, and the complex
processes of their formations in the Indian subcontinent, has been a
well-recognised historical fact. Based on their dominant constitutive
features, Barnard Cohn had long ago categorised them as historical,
linguistic, cultural and structural regions. These regions inhabited
diversities of social, cultural, political, economic and geographical
order of some kind and marked their significant contribution into
making of the larger subcontinental Indian empire. With the increasing
coercive control of the British colonial state on Indian society and its
various social and political institutions, regions too began to be affected
 Introduction

by a complex power dynamics unfolding at various levels. The colonial

state began to rupture the geolinguistic and cultural coherence of
these regions by arbitrarily aligning and realigning their boundaries in
order to weaken their supra-regional ties with the national movement.
The division of Bengal and its subsequent annulment led to violent
protests in Bengal and other parts of the country. Despite the violent
suppression of these regional loyalties and affinities by the colonial
state, the national movement continued to draw and grow upon the
continued support provided by people and prominent leaders from
various regions. This regional–national consciousness aimed at
anti-colonial struggle in different parts of the country continued to
sustain itself through an intimate association of these regions, and
their historical lineages and ancestry within the larger geographical
space that they were part of. The authoritative intrusive structures and
practices of the colonial state began to be part of its governmentalising
power which required it to create new domains of control and strategies
to dominate over the colonised. On the other hand, the historical and
cultural contiguity of various regions and provinces began to express
itself in various political and social movements.
The colonial state started devising policies of control over a large
land mass with many cultural regions inhabiting a highly diverse
population in India. The manner, in which the colonial rulers brought
most of the subcontinent under their rule left a lasting impact on
subsequent attempts at reorganisation. The early period lasting from
1757 to 1857 was one of conquest and expropriation of land and various
forms of surplus to uphold imperial interests. But from 1857 onwards
began a period of territorial consolidation of colonialism. However,
the attempts of the colonial government to govern the subcontinent
from a single centre were not successful and the British rule was not
a ‘monolithic structure’. Both policy decisions and implementation
depended upon information about different regions, and ability to
work within the political and legal framework stretching from local
councils to legislatures in the provinces, each of which had its own
political milieu (Barrier 1985: 114). This underlay the creation of
provinces though these were carved out largely based on economic
interests and administrative expediency rather than the needs and
desires of the people. Colonial logic underlay the creation of Madras
presidency that included Tamil and Telugu-speaking populations,
the Bombay presidency that included the Marathis and Gujaratis and
the Bengal presidency that had Bengali, Oriya and Hindi-speaking
populations. A significant lesson that emerges from the exigencies
of British rule is that the centre emerged out of the regions, moving
from Bengal to Delhi. The Montague-Chelmsford Reforms considered
the linguistic reorganisation of the provinces impractical even though
reforms favoured smaller states. The reorganisation of Orissa in 1936
on linguistic principles was the only example of the British acceptance
of this principle.
A few studies have pointed out the critical role fulfilled by these
regions in mobilising and activating the process of nation in the
making alongside the nationalist movement. The idea of ‘perennial
nuclear regions’ situated within compact geographical, political and
social space and history was to give primacy to the distinctiveness of
regions like Gandhara, Punjab, Saurashtra, Kalinga, Bundelkhand,
Chhattisgarh, Kaushal and Konkan among many others. The historical
location of these regions and their distinctive relationship with the
centre affected their subsequent significance as regional centres of
power and politics in post-independence India. Ainslie Embree
suggests that regions and their formations were affected by the varying
influences of the eastern and western traditions leading to different
notions of state formation in India and Europe in the nineteenth
century (1985: 19–40). The multiple invocations of both region
and nation thus were characteristic of twentieth century Indian
nationalism.The contestations over specific identities of regions and
provinces continued to shape the discourse of Indian nationalism for
several decades. The historical making of regional identities — whether
linguistic–cultural, social–political or ideological — continued to have
their impact on the national movement.
National Movement and the Early Signs
of Reorganisation
The Indian National Congress, a leading party of the national
movement, was composed of diverse regional leaders and their
supporters. In order to make itself into a mass political party, it began
to broaden its support base by incorporating various regional elites to
acquire a ‘supra-regional nationalist vision’ of a unified country. As
Broomfield (1982) has suggested that despite the use of nationalism
as a universal notion, the party continued to be local and regionally
specified in practice such as in the forms of regional institutions,
regional leaders, regional histories, myths and patriotism. In due
course of time, the Congress politics became intricately embroiled
in the local and provincial politics of different regions and states. It
was through this kind of bonding between the regional and the
national
that Congress built up its wide and heterogeneous support base.
It also established some kind of chain of command to ensure that
it functioned effectively both as a national and regional party
without,
however, undermining its image of a national party and
movement.
In due course of time, certain regions acquired more prominence
than others. The early Indian National Congress has been described
as a ‘national geographically widespread gathering from all parts of
the sub-continent a point of reference as well as an idea of India as a
comity’ (Masselos 1987: 1–58).
A number of language-based cultural movements emerged in
India since the mid-nineteenth century. They aimed at mobilising and
collectivising people on their dominant linguistic–cultural regional
identities. To name a few, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu,
Assamese, Gujarati and Marathi movements were in the forefront
of the national cultural renaissance project. Language emerged as an
important fulcrum around which demands for demarcation of regions
along linguistic lines arose. A large number of people joined the
movement in different parts of the country and integration of certain
regions within the national movement became a norm of the day. The
growth of regional elites played a key role in shaping the demand for
linguistic states. A number of scholarly works indicate that they arose
in different ways and at different points of time; some very early as
in Bengal, Madras and Maharashtra. They held different
interpretations
of the past and of the emerging nation, which formed the core
of each group’s sense of identity (Broomfield 1982: 9). Due to the
highly uneven speed at which they developed, there was ‘competition
and collaboration’ between them during the national movement,
particularly over boundaries of the emerging regions which was to
spill over into the post-independence period and cause problems
(Seal 1971: 23). The establishment of a centrally organised state under
the British, and of English as a link language, helped the new regional
elites who were in most cases from the upper castes/classes, to acquire
a ‘supra-regional nationalist vision’ which allowed them to work
effectively outside their own region. Many of the manifestations of this
nationalism in practice were local and exclusive in nature — regional
institutions, regional leaders, myths and patriotism.1
These developments underlay the demand from 1920 for the
linguistic reorganisation of the provinces. The idea had been mooted by
both the British and the Congress on a variety of occasions since 1903
when Sir Herbert Risley, then Home Secretary in the Government of
India, first raised the issue in connection with the proposed partition
of the large multilingual province of Bengal. The first evidence of
support by Congress to this principle was its opposition to the partition
of Bengal in 1905. The official recognition of the principle occurred
at the Congress session of 1917 and was necessitated by the agitation
for a separate Andhra Pradesh. However, Congress opinion had not
fully crystallised in favour of the linguistic principle, and despite being
discussed for two hours in the subjects committee, it was not supported
by the group led by Annie Besant who felt that the issue could await
the imminent 1919 reforms (Nag 1993). It was only in 1920 that under
the leadership of Gandhi that it adopted the principle as a clear political
objective and in the following year began to reorganise its branches
along these lines. Under the leadership of Gandhi, Congress voiced
the concerns of linguistic reorganisation of the Provincial Congress
Committees to make the Congress regionally more democratic
and plural. In Gandhi’s views, this will make the Congress a more
mass-based party and will shrink its elitist character. To this effect,
a resolution was made in the Nagpur session of the Congress in
1920 with a scheme to reorganise the 20 Provincial Congress
Committeeslinguistically and culturally more homogeneous. They
included Madras, Karnataka, Andhra, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat,
Sind, United Provinces, Punjab, Delhi, Ajmer, Marwar, Rajasthan,
Central Provinces, Berar, Bihar, Utkal, Bengal with the Surma Valley
districts, Assam and Burma. The nationalist leaders like Nehru, Patel,
Rajgopalachari, Abdul Haq, Rajendra Prasad and Ambedkar intensely
debated and intervened in this project of the reorganisation of the
provinces. By this time, the national movement began to be drawn
within the contestations over hierarchies of languages, regions, cultures,
castes and classes much more intensely. Nationalist leaders hoped that
the idea of provincial autonomy could be realised if the provinces were
reorganised linguistically. This required redrawing of boundaries of
these provinces to make them more homogeneous. The Congress
party continued to support the idea of linguistic reorganisation of the
provinces for several years. In 1927, it clearly stated in a resolution
its support for the redistribution of provinces on the linguistic basis
and referred to the right of self-determination of the people speaking
the same language and bound by the same tradition and culture. The
Motilal Nehru Report of 1928 also examined this demand in detail
and recommended that factors such as administrative convenience and
financial viability along with ‘people’s wishes and the linguistic unity
of the area’ concerned should be taken into account.
SRC and the Reorganisation of States
At the time of independence, different visions about the reorganisation
of regions and provinces were shared and debated over among various
political leaders belonging to different political parties. The Congress
leadership put forth the Nehruvian vision of reorganisation on the
broader principle of ‘unity in diversity’ which was much contested
by several other leaders including Ambedkar, who seriously thought
and extensively wrote on this subject. Even though the reorganisation
question had been much discussed among the nationalist leaders after
independence, the events of partition, communal riots, rehabilitation
of refugees, food security and the fear of disintegration of the country
remained a matter of uppermost concern in their mind. The nation-
building exercise of the newly independent India had to be envisioned
in a more participative manner. The new federal democratic political
structure was supposed to reconcile the balance of power between a
strong centre and stable regions and states. The ‘civilisational’ state
that the Indian subcontinent symbolised in pre-colonial India began to
find expression in new cultural and political terms after independence.
Initially for a few years, no active policy was formulated on this
issue. However, the subject of reorganisation of the provinces began
to be thought afresh after independence and the Linguistic Provinces
Commission, popularly known as Dar Commission, was set-up in
1948. This commission recommended that the formation of new
states should be postponed for a few years. However, soon after this,
a committee consisting of Nehru, Patel and Sitaramayya known as
JVP Committee was formed to further reflect and act upon the issue
of reorganisation of provinces. This committee cautioned against
disintegrative effects of reorganisation. Both the Dar Commission
and JVP Committee expressed their concerns regarding new forms
of inequalities and hierarchies based on the disproportionate spread
of linguistic majority and minority groups in these reorganised
provinces.
Nehru, like many other Congress leaders at that time, was
ambivalent
and uncertain about the timing of the reorganisation of states
after independence. Even though he had supported the idea since his
days as a member of the Motilal Nehru Committee, he continued
to suggest for delaying of this process for some more time as he was
worried about its potentially disintegrative consequences. Therefore,
he said that the ‘first thing must come first, and the first thing is the
security and stability of India’ since ‘it would be extraordinarily
unwise to unsettle and uproot the whole of India for a theoretical
approach or linguistic division’ (quoted in Government of India
1955: 22). However, despite his initial reluctance and restraint to
take a decision on this subject, he continued to support the demand
for Andhra province, and subsequently conceded to it much before
the recommendations of the SRC were actualised in 1956. Nehru
was not fully convinced of the viability and durability of monolingual
states which, in his views, would not be sustainable in the long run.
Even though he agreed to the formation of Andhra province, he
refusedto accept serious alterations in the provincial boundaries of
the existing provinces. He warned against any kind of passionate
surge in demand for separate states based on an exclusive ideology of
language or religion. He wanted these provinces to become examples
of administrative efficiency and icons of multi-cultural and multilingual
political order. He wanted large states to retain their cosmopolitan
character and be capable, in due course of time, to carry forward his
vision of a socialistic democratic and planned development of different
regions and sub-regions of the country.
Ambedkar, unlike Nehru, supported the demand for reorganisation
of states on the linguistic basis. As chairman of the Drafting Committee
of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar gave particular attention to this
issue in his writings and speeches, and strongly argued for the creation
of Maharashtra as a case of linguistic reorganisation.2 He justified the
creation of linguistic states due to certain ‘definite political advantages’
that would accrue for the ‘functioning of a democratic polity’, and
considered
four basic principles such as development, efficiency, equality
and democracy for ushering in the era of reorganisation of states
in independent India. Contrary to Nehru, Ambedkar argued that a
common language and culture would promote unity and stability in the
country, and listed numerous reasons in support of it. A heterogeneous
population, he argued, could get divided into hostile groups leading
to discrimination, neglect, partiality and suppression of interests of
smaller groups with power remaining in the hands of one powerful
group, which would be detrimental to the working of the democracy.
He proposed that each state may have its own language for purposes
of administrative communication with the centre and other states but
disregarded the thesis of ‘one language, one state’. Like Nehru, he too
favoured a strong centre to ensure an equitable survival of different
languages, cultures, regions and states within a broader framework
of an inclusive developmental polity. Pointing to the dangers of
numerically dominant language groups becoming communal and
exploitative, he cautioned against the dangerous alliance between
caste, class and language dominance which could result in the upper
class, caste and language controlling land, commerce, economy,
administrationand education. He warned against the war of languages
between dominant regional and numerous provincial languages on
the one hand and between regional languages and English language
on the other.
Ambedkar put forward a number of proposals in his Needs for Checks
and Balances: Articles on Linguistic States which, in his views, would
provide safeguards against linguistic communalism. He held onto
the view that people speaking the same language need not be grouped
into one state but ‘there could be more than one state with the same
language’. The formula of one state, one language, he pointed out,
was not to be equated with one language, one state. Instead, people
speaking one language might be divided into many states depending
upon other factors such as the requirements of administrative efficiency,
specific needs of particular areas and the proportion between majority
and minority communities within a state. For Ambedkar, states in a
democratic polity needed to have equitable size limits since this would
ensure proportional distribution of resources among the states as well
as their inhabitants. In fact, K. M. Pannikar, a member of the SRC,
in his dissenting note on Uttar Pradesh, had argued that too great a
disparity in size could lead to suspicion and resentment among states
and generate forces likely to be divisive for the federation. As the
recent demands for smaller states suggest, larger state can become
hegemonic and undemocratic through their numerical strength and
command over natural and physical resources which can have serious
impact on the federal democratic structure of the country. Ambedkar,
on the other hand, pointed out that the issue of Hindi to be made as
the national language had already divided the northern and southern
states. His views regarding the equality of size are important in the
contemporary context when the demand by the southern states for
postponement of the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies to the
year 2030 is being proposed to maintain the balance of membership
in Lok Sabha among states. Ambedkar recommended the division of
four large states of UP, MP, Bihar and Maharashtra much before the
recommendations of the SRC were made. The political events which
have occurred in the last few years have already secured the division
of the first three states whereas the demand to bifurcate Maharashtra
is gaining ground at present. The trifurcation of UP seemed to be
coinciding with his proposal to divide it into three states of western,
eastern and central UP with their capitals at Meerut, Allahabad and
Kanpur respectively.
By the early 1950s, demand for linguistic reorganisation of states
had become intensely political. The Congress party itself had been
severely divided over this issue with its central leadership reluctant
and somewhat opposed to this demand whereas the state-level
leadership
was keen to pursue it. Stanley Kochanek’s classical work on the
Congress party pointed out significant changes which occurred in
the membership of the Congress party from the mid-1930s onward.
The increasing membership saw a number of middle caste land-owning
elites who benefitted from the abolition of the zamindari joining
the party. They became the new power elite in the countryside and
the Congress began to use them as supportive vote banks in various
states. This was particularly true of states in western and southern
India where regional elites had emerged and represented themselves
in the Congress party during the national movement. The Marathas in
Maharashtra, Kammas and Reddis in Andhra and Lingayats and
Vokaliggas in Karnataka, among others, had emerged as middle-
caste, economically better-off and upwardly mobile regional elites
within the Congress party. Their caste–class alliance began to find
expression in their support for the linguistic reorganisation of the
states soon after independence. It was no surprise that demands for
Greater Gujarat, Maha Punjab, United Maharashtra, Vishal Andhra
and Maha Vidarbha were primarily supported by their economic and
political interests.
The SRC was set up in 1953 with Syed Fazl Ali, H. N. Kunzru and
K. M. Panikkar as its members. The commission toured the country
and examined documents and memoranda and interviewed more than
9,000 people. It reconsidered four principles which it felt were being
important in laying down the recommendations for the reorganisation.
These were preservation and strengthening of the unity and security
of India, linguistic and cultural homogeneity, financial and
administrative
efficiency and the successful working of the five-year national
economic plans. However, the commission did emphasise primacy of
the linguistic factor while demarcating the boundaries of the states.
It tried to strike a balance between larger and smaller states and a strong
centre dependent on economically and administratively viable and
democratic states. In a sense, the SRC drew outlines of the political
geography of independent India. Criteria such as size, financial
viability, political unity, stability and regional coherence were favoured
by the commission to provide guidelines for the future demarcation of
boundaries between Gujarat and Maharashtra, Punjab and Haryana,
northeastern states and so on. However, it had recommended against
the merger of Telangana into Andhra Pradesh, suggested to retain
the composite state of Bombay with Gujarati and Marathi-speaking
areas remaining with it and argued for a separate state of Vidarbha.
The Congress Working Committee members from both of these states
rejected these recommendations. The proposal to merge Bihar and
Bengal, which ran counter to the SRC’s recommendations, had the
support of the chief ministers of both of these states and also of Nehru.
However, it was opposed by the West Bengal States Reorganisation
Committee consisting of left parties and political groups. It held that
distinct linguistic nationalities existed in the subcontinent and must
be recognised. The central government thought that if the merger
of Bihar and Bengal could be effective, similar moves could also be
made for merging many other states and regions such as Gujarat and
Maharashtra or combining all four southern states into one (Bondurant
1958: 76–104.) Even though the SRC submitted its recommendations
in 1956, and several states were reorganised soon after this, the
following decades continued to witness demands for reorganisation of
other states. Maharashtra and Gujarat were created in 1960, Haryana
and Punjab in 1966, Nagaland in 1963, several states in the north-east
of the country during the years of 1970–1980 and Goa in 1992. The
last to join the list are Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand in
the year 2000. In this long journey of reorganisation, a few principles
have been made into guidelines by the centre while deciding to redraw
or reorganise the existing boundaries of the states. Paul Brass has listed
them as follows: these regional demands must stop short of secession;
demands based on language and culture could be accommodated but
not those based explicitly on religious differences; demands must have
clearly demonstrated public support; and the division of multilingual
states must have some support from different linguistic groups
(1974: 17). For example, the demand for the Sikh state was conceded
only when the Akali movement under Sant Fateh Singh explicitly
stated that it was not a secessionist demand and was based on
languageand not on religion. The formation of Nagaland and Assam
was no exception in this regard. As the democratic functioning of
the Indian state unfolded, more demands for creating smaller states
arose primarily due to their continued economic backwardness and
increasingly becoming sub-regions within the larger states. The
linguistic–cultural minorities also began to feel the fear of increasing
minoritisation within these states.
Demand for Smaller States in the
Contemporary Context
After independence, a number of demands were raised by various
linguistic–cultural minorities in the then existing large states for
recognition of their languages and cultural identities such as Bodos in
Assam, Coorgs in Karnataka and Nepalese in West Bengal. The Bodo
movement raised twin issues of making Bodo as the language of
education
within the growing hegemonic control of the Assamese language,
and the recognition of economically backward position of the Bodo
community in the state of Assam. The movements for a separate state
of Coorg in Karnataka in the late 1990s or for the creation of a Tulu
state on the coast in the erstwhile Hyderabad–Karnataka northern
regionhave emerged due to their ‘cultural distinctiveness and economic
neglect’ (Assadi 1977: 3114). Assadi argues that the movement for
Coorg has been led by rich plantation owners and landowners, and
can be understood as part of the contradictions prompted by changes
in the economy due to the process of globalisation on the one hand and
the defining of Coorgis over the years as a culturally dislocated and
de-ethnicised category on the other. Similarly, the Napalese in the hill
districts of West Bengal have been demanding for a Gorkhaland state
due to reasons of cultural distinctiveness and economic marginalisation
of the community within the existing state of West Bengal. These
demands reveal some of the inherent tensions between the centre
and states with the latter asking for more autonomy in the spheres of
culture, economy and polity. As many as 30 such demands seem to
be pending for consideration before the government at the moment
(Majeed 2003; Sarangi 2010). With the creation of three new states
in the year 2000, several other states began to voice their agitation for
smaller states more explicitly. The twin processes of democratisation
and regionalisation of the politics have expanded demands focusing
on better governance, equitable economic growth, a more responsive
bureaucratic state apparatus, increased participative political order
and better indices of development of various regions and sub-regions
within the existing states. Due to the former, new social collectives
and groups have asserted themselves creating a highly competitive
electoral politics within which regional and state-based political
parties have staked their specific demands. The latter has led to the
transfer of power from a single centre to various blocks within the
states generating demands among new sub-regional elites for greater
share in governance in these states and in coalitional governments
at the centre. At the same time, globalisation and liberalisation have
led to the establishment of a global–national market economy which
has opened up the floodgates for private capital leading to increasing
regional inequalities among states, and contributing to the rising
demands for smaller states.
It is noteworthy to see a significant shift in the recent decades
indicating that the focus has moved away from language and culture
that shaped the earlier process of reorganisation to the one driven by
specific needs of the political economy of development and social–
cultural inclusion. The issue of size remains highly controversial. Both
Haryana and Himachal Pradesh are often put forward as examples of
small states that have performed well. Critics have argued that mere
creation of smaller states does not guarantee that they will be well-
governed, or will experience faster economic development. However,
others have pointed out that the recently created small states are not
performing badly. As per recent Central Statistical Organization
(CSO) data, Bihar’s growth has been 11.03 per cent over the last five
years following negative 5.15 per cent growth in 2003–2004, and is
above the national average of 8.49 per cent (Singh 2010). The new
state of Uttarakhand has attained a growth rate of 9.31 per cent as
against 6.29 per cent in the case of its parent state of Uttar Pradesh.
Commentators have underlined that the issue is not merely of size
but of ‘state capacity’ which varies widely across India. Hence, the
focus should be on the conditions under which different states are
likely to acquire the requisite state capacity (Mehta 2009). Maya
Chadda (2002) explains the formation of the three new states in 2000
as one of the reasons for closer integration of ‘ethnic and caste-based
regional parties’ in the central government. These states, which were
part of the larger states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh,
were also the ‘first ones not created on linguistic or cultural grounds’
(Majeed 2003: 97). They were part of the larger states which were
created on the basis of ‘regional identity enshrined in cultural and
geographical differences ... the justification being administrative
efficiency’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, there has been ample scholarly evidence
to suggest that the three new states formed remained backward
and underdeveloped in several aspects within the larger states they
were part of. The emerging political elite in all of these three states
remained important as part of the rural politico-economic structure
but was absent from the political representation in the parent states.
As a result of the formation of smaller states, they are able to enter the
political and administrative structure of the state, and exercise control
over its resources and patronage network which gradually increases
their prospects of playing role in the national politics. If Uttarakhand
was separated from Uttar Pradesh to address the specific problems of
the hilly regions and their inadequate development, Chhattisgarh and
Jharkhand were formed to make the tribal populated regions more
developed and autonomous in the democratic functioning of their
states. It is equally important to consider the timing of the formation
of these new states as the party in government, during whose tenure
these states were formed, hoped to build support and a future base in
these particular states. Promises for the creation of new states were
often made by political parties in the 1990s prior to the state assembly
or national elections in order to obtain support and to build a future
base in the state. A good example was the announcement made just
prior to the 1996 state election by the then Prime Minister Deve Gowda
on 15 August 1996 that the centre was considering a new state of
Uttarakhand. Similarly, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) was keen in
the late 1990s to control the proposed state of Chhattisgarh, seen as
an extension of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS-controlled
Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram centred in Jashpur and Sarguja and other
tribal areas rich in mineral resources, to build an electoral base. Emma
Mawdsley suggests that one way in which the BJP fought to respond
to the challenge of the emergence of lower/backward caste parties in
north India was to back these regional movements as it would give
them a foothold in the region and accrue political pay-offs in terms
of controlling the state governments and their representatives in the
Parliament at the centre. She suggests that even though the number
of seats involved was relatively small, in the new era of unstable
coalition government at the centre, a few seats either way could help
determine who would govern in a particular state or even at the centre
(Mawdsley 2002). The idea of smaller states has found support among
political elites across parties over time due to the changes taking
place, particularly with the emergence of other backward caste
communitiesand the presence of their strong leaders within the Congress
and the BJP.
 At times, promising a new state might prove to be a better strategy
than promising development in exchange for votes. The formation
of these states, in contrast to earlier rounds of reorganisation, lacked
a sustained mass movement and popular agitation for a long period
of time. Rather the demand for separate state was triggered off in
conjunction with several other regional issues related to the preservation
of forests, welfare of tribal communities, emergence of new regional
elites, new economic and political power equations among rich
cultivating peasantry and rise of other backward castes and a number
of regional political parties in these states. Economic backwardness of
sub-regions within large states has emerged as an important ground
on which demands for new states are being made. This is evident from
the immediate demands for smaller states of Vidharbha, Saurashtra,
Bodoland, Coorg and Harit Pradesh among others. The colonial
state supported commercial agriculture and industry in selected areas
such as the coastal regions, deltas, river valleys and mineral-rich
areas leaving the vast hinterland underdeveloped. Such a distorted
pattern of unequal development among regions continued into the
post-independence period as well. The result has been an uneven
development in the big states of India, surrounded by poorer regions
remaining backward and underdeveloped. Telangana, Bundelkhand,
Poorvanchal, Vidharbha and the inner tribal regions of Orissa have
continued to remain as deprived regions within large states.
However, liberalisation and the emergence of a growing private
sector within the market economy could mean that the formation
of a separate state of Telangana may not benefit the people of this
backward region. After independence, the rich landlord class in the
coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh moved inland into the agro-industry
manufacturing and in more recent years the information technology
sector in Hyderabad. With the advent of a market-led economy, it
is questionable if the aspirations of the people of Telangana (and
other such regions) can be easily fulfilled. Regional inequalities have
markedly increased since the early 1990s with retreat of the state
and a growing private sector increasingly controlling investment
decisions of scarce resources. It will be difficult for the poorly educated
and disadvantaged groups in the underdeveloped regions to obtain
employment, particularly in the better paid and more dynamic
sectors of the economy. The well-educated and better-off ‘outsiders’
might benefit leaving the people of the new state behind, heightening
feelings of regional chauvinism. While the above discussed aspects are
significant and have generated much debate on the manner in which
the issue of reorganisation should be handled, the more immediate
reasons underlying the formation of three new states in 2000 lie in
the changes that have taken place in the politics of the states in Hindi
heartland. The states in this region were not formed on the basis of
regional identities as in southern and western India. The form and
degree of resistance to the creation of these three states was different
and much less than at the time of the first wave of reorganisation of
states in 1956.
The existing writings on the reorganisation of states have focused
more closely on the questions of language, region and state as the
central aspects of reorganisation which were carried out at
different
phases. Significant attention has not been paid to the political
economy of formation of socioeconomic regions and their roles in
the economic and political restructuring of different states from time
to time. Historically, it is clear that the colonial state invested heavily
in the coastal regions leading to the development of big metropolises
like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and a few other important cities. The
colonial state introduced commercialisation of agriculture through
irrigation projects in selected regions such as the canal colonies of
Punjab, delta regions of Andhra and Madras and canals in western
Uttar Pradesh. Industrial investment too was in selected enclaves.
This kind of uneven pattern of development was carried forward in
independent India despite the socialist objectives envisaged under
the centralised planning of the Indian state. The green revolution in
agriculture, following capitalist technological mode of production,
was introduced in the same regions and districts which had prospered
under the colonial rule. Thus water and other required resources were
easily available for giving a boost to agricultural yields and plentiful
supply of food. Despite the assurance that centrally-funded industrial
projects were meant to be established in the backward regions in
order to develop them and to provide local employment, this did not
happen under the license-raj system. The result has been a pattern of
capitalist development in enclaves in the large states, surrounded by
poorer regions which have remained backward and underdeveloped
on various levels. At the time of independence, it was hoped that the
capital would move from the developed to the underdeveloped areas
and labour from underdeveloped to developed areas, thus creating a
‘trickle down’ effect which would result in the overall development
of different states and regions within them. Now the demand of these
backward regions such as Telangana, Bundelkhand, Baghelkhand,
Marathwada, Mahakoshal and Poorvanchal for separate statehood
is for reasons of equitable distribution of resources for their people
who have been left out of the circuit of state-led development. On the
other hand, with the onset of the market-led economy, it is doubtful as
to how the regional inequalities, which have increased manifold over
the last few years, will be addressed by the privatised and corporatised
economic institutions of the Indian state. With a vigorous and growing
private sector shaping the economy and controlling the investment
of the scarce resources, limited funds have been made available for
public investment on the part of the state. This makes it difficult for
the poorly educated and disadvantaged groups in the poorer regions
to acquire jobs and guaranteed employment in better-paid and more
dynamic sectors of the economy. It is once again the educated and
better-off sections of the population who are benefiting from new forms
of job opportunities and disinvestment of the state resources, leaving
the marginalised more and more disadvantaged.
The formation of new states was also a process of reformatting their
linguistic–cultural and regional identities which over a long period
of time gave a notion of ‘homeland’ to communities living within
these states. However, in the process, distinct cultural regions began
to take shape alongside a more intense process of democratisation and
regionalisation of power at various levels. The federalisations of
democratic structures and practices have strengthened the bargaining
power of various states which have also followed their own distinctive
‘political culture’ and socioeconomic pattern of development. Liber-
alisation and globalisation, leading to the establishment of a market
economy, have opened up the floodgates for private capital and more
financial autonomy to the states. The formation of coalitional
governments
in the last two decades has made the roles of regional parties
more significant in the national politics. Due to the democratisation of
this sort, new social collectives and groups have asserted themselves,
changing the established contours of the state party system and leading
to newer political alignments in every election (Pai 2002). This in
turn has given rise to the emergence of a highly competitive electoral
politics within which regional and state-based political parties have
staked their specific demands. With the decline of the Nehruvian
model of democratic consensus and the onset of newer forms of
political central-ism, demands for several smaller states can be seen as
‘low-key state demands’ without having a well-defined political design
and even economic outlay for these states (Kumar 1998: 130–40).
The Congress party passed a resolution in 2001 proposing to set up
a reorganisation commission to consider redrawing the map of India
for addressing the demand for smaller states. In 2008, prior to the Lok
Sabha and assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, the Congress again
supported the proposal. However, it was a short-term tactic to form a
partnership with the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) to obtain votes in
Telangana and was abandoned after the Congress emerged victorious
as the party fear antagonism from the coastal Andhra leaders. The
leader of the TRS Chandrashekhar Rao’s 11-day fast in late 2009 again
pushed the United Progressive Allaince (UPA) government to agree
to a resolution on the formation of Telangana. However, the backlash
from political leaders — including Congressmen — in Andhra and
Rayalseema and demands for other states, has put the Congress
leadership
in a bind. The Srikrishna Committee, set-up to look into the issue
of a separate state of Telangana, submitted its report in December 2010
and suggested six broad options to address this demand. The report
suggests the creation of a separate Telangana only if this demand is
supported by a large majority of people in the region. However, the
report also fears the surge in the demand for several other smaller
states if Telangana gets formed, and thus advises to develop a mature
consensus, grown and sustained through the wises and desires of people
of all three regions — Telangana, Coastal Andhra and Rayalseema.
The issue of reorganisation of states — in Andhra Pradesh and
elsewhere — remains a complex and unfinished task before the political
leadership at the centre, and in the states today.

Specificity and Significance of the Volume

The essays included in this volume address the question of reorgan-
isation from historical–contextual perspectives as well as reflect upon
the contemporary demands for newer and smaller states. Drawing both
on theoretical and empirical bases, these essays open up conceptual
and empirical frameworks of analysis for understanding this subject.
The various essays of the volume have been organised around the four
distinctive themes in the following manner.
 Introduction + 19

Reorganisation: Historical-Political Context and

Contemporary Concerns
The 'Foreword' by B. G. Verghese narrativises the process of reorgan-
isation of states from the time of the SRC till the future year 2060. It
draws attention to democratic challenges before the Indian state, its
federal political structure and the difficult task of striking a balance
between integration versus segregation of tribal identity, particularly
in the case of north-east India - a region that has witnessed a num-
ber of movements over questions of sovereignty, separate statehood,
homeland and autonomy. In his 'vision 2060', he imagines that the
country would have 60 states each with an average of 25 million
population, 15 districts of one million population and 15,000 devel-
opment blocks each with population of 10,000. Smaller units, he
argues, could make planning much easier, could ensure better political
participation, governmental transparency and accountability to ad-
dress more specific needs of people. Asha Sarangi in her essay takes
into account historical narratives and readings of reorganisation since
the N agpur session of the Indian National Congress where Gandhi
proposed to reorganise the 20 Provincial Congress Committees on the
linguistic-cultural basis. The essay focuses on Nehru's ideas about the
reorganisation of states and his initial fears, confusions and doubts
about the viability of linguistically and culturally shaped and sized
states. Based on a close reading ofNehru's writings- both political
and personal- she points out the philosophical and conceptual strands
of thinking in Nehru's writings on this subject. She rightly suggests
that for Nehru, language was not a simple communicative device but
signified a deep cultural symbolic order of a society. Nehru's vision
of a new independent India rested primarily on creating economically
viable and politically integrative states with a proper balance being
maintained between territorial size of different regions and the na-
tional sovereignty and integrity of the country. Nehru's continued
caution to his fellow colleagues and political leaders on this subject
before and after independence is a good reminder for the present con-
text. It is within this larger context that the next chapter by Ranabir
Samaddar argues for the 'right size, right territory and right people'
to be the central concern for the reorganisation process. The colonial
rule ignored this principle completely. In post-colonial independent
India, what seems to be a governing principle for the reorganisation
of states, according to him, is not simply a cultural criterion but the
logic of capital, of economy and development of core regions and
states. Samaddar poses an extremely significant question — whether
the reorganisation of states and regions would make the political space
available for generating more capital in post-liberalised economy and
polity of contemporary India.
Reorganising the Hindi Heartland
The two essays in this section discuss the trajectory of state formation
in the Hindi heartland with focus on the states of Madhya Pradesh
and Chhattisgarh. Sudha Pai suggests that large states like Madhya
Pradesh, with diverse cultural sub-regions in the Hindi heartland,
lacked political integration and a composite identity. Analysing the
integrative role of the Congress party in the state, she argues that the
process of political integration was slow and partial due to endemic
factionalism and bipartisan politics as this became gradually evident
from the demand for creating the state of Chhattisgarh. This essay also
suggests that perhaps smaller states would not necessarily translate
into better units of governance or faster economic development
without more inclusive structures for regional and socioeconomic
development. The following essay by Louise Tillin attributes the
creation
of three new states to the claims of regional neglect. Taking the
case of Chhattisgarh, she provides a detailed analysis as to why and
how consensus was achieved and why politicians at the regional level
began to support such demand for separate statehood. Her chapter
rightly draws attention to the dual trends — the rise of certain groups
belonging to owner-cultivator farmers in some regions and their
mobilisation via quota politics of the lower castes — in many states
of north India. In her view, such a complex set of factors changed the
political logic of the old geography of border in the dominant regions
of north India and its states.
Languages and States: Western and Southern India
The four essays in this section examine the process of reorganisation
and the formation of specific states in western and southern India.
Rita Kothari’s essay critically analyses how the Sindhi language has
become a minority language in independent India and how Sindhis
too have become a linguistic minority. This despite the fact that
Hindu Sindhis, Kacchis, Khojas and Memons in Gujarat, Tharis and
Jaisalmeris in Rajasthan speak varieties of Sindhi. In this regard, she
points out that Sindhis enter into a dialogue with the state in the arena
of land, language and script as symbolic spaces of power. However,
state grant provided through activities like education, literature and
publication is limiting for a community which does not have a state
of its own based on the linguistic–cultural basis. The essay brings out
the nuances over the choice of script — Devnagari or Perso-Arabic
— for the Sindhi language at the time of its entry into the Eighth
Schedule of the Indian Constitution in 1967. She reminds us subtly
that ‘instead of becoming an organic expression of pluralism, Sindhi
has become a structural expression of pluralistic design’. The next
chapter by Usha Thakkar and Nagindas Sanghavi track down the long
historical trajectory of events leading to the creation of Maharashtra
and Gujarat as two separate states in 1960. They point out that while
most of the leaders in Maharashtra under the Samyukta Maharashtra
Samiti supported the demand for a unified state of Maharashtra,
Vidarbha insisted on being a separate state. Gujaratis too staked their
claim to Mumbai. The essay brings critical events of contemporary
times dealing with Maratha elites’ dominance over rural economy,
the split in the Congress in Maharashtra, the formation of the
Nationalist
Congress Party under the leadership of Sharad Pawar, the rise
and development of the Shiv Sena over the past several decades and
most recently the emergence of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena
(MNS). The two other essays in this section deal with the state of
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka of southern India. K. Srinivasulu in
his essay situates the demand for Telangana statehood within the
larger problematic of linguistic nationalism. In his critical analysis of
this demand historically over the past six and half decades, he shows
very competently the two opposite demands — one for Vishalandhra
(greater Andhra), a unified state for the Telugus, and another one
for Telangana. He suggests that the demand for greater Andhra was
theoretically informed by the nationality question articulated by the
Communist Left whereas the demand for Telangana has been
governedmore in terms of the logic of political pragmatism and an idea
of regional under/and uneven development. This chapter traces the
long historical journey of the Telangana demand and shows limits
of the linguistic principle on the one hand, and an increasing power
of democratisation process as a whole on the other to understand
the logic of this demand. The essay by V. B. Tharakeshwar analyses
Kannada nationalism in the early twentieth century colonial India.
Elaborating the idea of Karnatakatwa or Karnatakaism in the writings
of Kannada writers like Venkat Rao, he suggests that three concentric
and not vertical hierarchical notions of global, Indian and Karnataka
order were present simultaneously. The ideology of Karnatakatwa was
for the reunification of Kannada-speaking regions during the colonial
period. The author argues that a certain degree of cultural unification
is a precondition for the political unification and thus tries to establish
a close relationship between language and land in his analysis of the
Kannada nationalism.
Culture and Identity: Reorganisation in the East
and the North-East
The three essays in this section address the question of reorganisation
in the state of Orissa and the north-eastern states. Nivedita Mohanty
traces Oriya movement in the nineteenth and twentieth century
colonial India. She describes how different parts of Orissa were
adjoined with different provinces namely Central Provinces, Bengal
and Madras Presidencies and Chotanagpur division. In this entire
course of events, the Utkal Sammelan remained in the forefront for the
linguistic formation of Orissa. Mohanty argues that the SRC did not
have anything much to offer to Orissa where the language movement
had already acquired sufficient support several decades before other
states were formed and reorganised linguistically. Both Sajal Nag and
Ivy Dhar discuss the complex process of reorganisation of Assam and
its impact on the north-east regions of India. Situating his analytical
framework within the theory of ‘imagined community and territory’,
Sajal Nag in his essay argues that the SRC provided a departure from
the linguistic principle for the formation of states in independent India.
The SRC made cases for the multilingual provinces to be formed.
He further clarifies that the SRC did not favour the demand for the
formation of a separate hill state initially and in this case, it did not
seem to adhere to the principle of formation of linguistic provinces in
the north-east of the country. The creation of several states in 1971 in
this region went beyond the recommendations of the SRC because,
as Nag suggests, the concept of homeland became more and more
acceptable in this part of the country. The essay by Ivy Dhar clearly
suggests that the SRC did not favour formation of small states in the
north-east of the country, even though the Assamese middle class had
been active in standardising the Assamese language at the time of
reorganisation. In this context, Dhar draws attention to Asom Sahitya
Sabha and its crucial role in the making of Assamese as the state
language of Assam. She also examines the conflict between plains and
hill tribes and the demand for Bodoland being a result of the reorgan-
isation of the north-east region. She examines in detail as to how the
medium of instruction had already gained momentum after Asssamese
was declared as the medium of instruction in the universities of Assam
following the North-East Reorganisation Act 1972.
The essays included in the volume aim at addressing the question
of reorganisation from an interdisciplinary framework which further
provides the sets of questions which are yet unresolved and
unanswered. Whether the reorganisation was a success or failure is not
the task at hand in this volume. Instead, the theory and practice within
which the rationale of reorganisation was conceptualised and carried
forward is a subject of serious academic engagement that will open up
the debate on issues of vital concern such as the nature and form of
political and cultural inclusion, democratisation of regional identities
and centralisation of political power, both at the centre and states. The
demand for setting up of a second state reorganisation commission is
to understand newer demands for state autonomy situated within the
larger context of coalitional structures of state power and its various
constituents engaged in their political bargaining of various kinds.
The emergence of regional political parties and their importance
in coalitions formed at the centre to form governments could push
demands for creating more states in the near future. The continuing
process of democratisation aiming to reach down to new social groups
and regions will not only create and increase political consciousness
among the disadvantaged groups in the states, but also produce new
local and regional elites who would like to participate and determine
the contours of political governance in their regions. Widening regional
inequalities among states under the process of globalisation will create
more intense competition for sharing resources in intersecting regions
and sub-regions of the states.

Notes
1. This has been made clear in a number of historical writings by various
scholars. A few such writings are Frykenberg 1965; Arnold 1977; Baker
1976; Washbrook 1976; Bayly 1975; Brass 1974; Masselos 1987; and
Broomfield 1982.
2. For more details on it, see Sarangi (2006). Ambedkar (1979a, 1979b) wrote
extensively on this subject.
References
Ambedkar, Bhim Rao. 1979a. ‘Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province’, in
Writings
and Speeches, vol. 1, comp. and ed. Vasant Moon. Bombay: Education
Department, Government of Maharashtra.
———. 1979b. ‘Thoughts on the Linguistic States’, inWritings and Speeches,
vol. 1, comp. and ed. Vasant Moon, pp. 11–12. Bombay: Education
Department,Government of Maharashtra.
Arnold, David. 1977. The Congress in Tamilnad. Delhi: Manohar.
Assadi, Muzaffar. 1997. ‘Separatist Movement in Coorg’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 32 (49): 3114–16.
Baker, Christopher J. 1976. The Politics of South India, 1920–1937 . Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Barrier, Gerald. 1985. ‘Regional Political History: New Trends in the Study of
British India’, in Paul Wallace (ed.), Region and Nation, pp. 111–54. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Bayly, C. A. 1975. The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 . Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Bondurant, Joan V. 1958. ‘Regionalism versus Provincialism: A Study in
Problems of Indian National Unity’, monograph. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Brass, Paul R. 1974. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Broomfield, John. 1982. ‘The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern Indian
History’, in John Broomfield (ed.), Mostly About Bengal: Essays in Modern
Indian History, pp. 1–15. Delhi: Manohar.
Chadda, Maya. 2002. ‘Integration through Internal Reorganisation: Containing
Ethnic Conflict in India’, Ethnopolitics, 2 (1): 44–61.
Embree, Ainslie. 1985. ‘Indian Civilisation and Regional Cultures: The Two
Realities’, in Paul Wallace (ed.), Region and Nation in India. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Frykenberg, Robert. 1965. Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence
and Central Authority in South India. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Government of India. 1955. ‘Report of the States Reorganization Commission
1955’. Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India.
Kumar, B. B. 1998. Small States Syndrome in India. Delhi: Concept Publishing
House.
Majeed, Akhtar. 2003. ‘The Changing Politics of States’ Reorganization’,
Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 33 (4): 83–98.
Masselos, Jim. 1987. ‘Introduction. Comity and Commonality: The Forging of
a Congress Identity’, in Jim Masselos (ed.), Struggling and Ruling: The Indian
National Congress 1885–1985. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
Mawdsley, Emma. 2002. ‘Redrawing the Body politic: Federalism,
Regionalism
and the Creation of New States in India’, The Journal of Commonwealth
and Comparative Politics, 40 (3): 34–54.
Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. 2009. ‘Sizeable Matters’, The Indian Express , Delhi,
16 December.
Nag, Sajal. 1993. ‘Multiplication of Nations: Political Economy of Sub-
Nationalism in India’, Economic and Political Weekly , 28 (29/30):
1521–32.
Pai, Sudha. 2000. State Politics in India: New Dimensions Party System,
Liberalization
and Politics of Identity. Delhi: Shipra publications.
Sarangi, Asha. 2006. ‘Ambedkar and the Linguistic States: A Case for
Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly , XLI (2): 151–58.
———. 2010. ‘Reorganisation: Then and Now’, Frontline, January, Chennai.
Seal, Anil. 1971. The Emergence of Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in
the Nineteenth Century. London: Cambridge University Press.
Singh, Santosh. 2010. ‘At 11.03%, Bihar Growth rate only a step behind
Gujarat’, The Indian Express, New Delhi, 4 January.
Washbrook, David A. 1976. The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras
Presidency, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Part I
Historical and Political Context
of Reorganisation
 1
Nehru and the Reorganisation of States:
Making of Political India
Asha Sarangi

Independence of India came with the difficult task of the ‘integration

of states’, which required a careful and pragmatic political strategy on
the part of national leaders combining cultural diversity with the
political
unity of the country. As a mature political leader and the first
prime minister of independent India, Nehru had to initiate the twin
processes of state and nation formation in post-partitioned India. At
the same time, demands for regional and territorial recognition of
cultural identities on the part of various linguistic and social-ethnic
communities and groups had begun to affect the broader process
of state formation in various parts of the country. Nehru faced an
acute moral dilemma of how to build a strong and durable state
economically and politically, within the culturally plural and socially
diversified social order, by cohabiting the ideology of political
democracy and cultural secularity in a mutually sustainable manner.
For this, he quite reluctantly conceded to the demand for the creation
of Andhra state soon after independence. The Nehruvian model
of statecraft embedded within the constitutional design of planned
economy, cultural plurality and territorial integrity had its immediate
effects in the succeeding decades of 1950s and 1960s when states
were reorganised following the recommendations of the States
Reorganisation Commission (henceforth SRC). In this essay, I
focus on the political pragmatism and expediency with which Nehru
worked to carry forward the long and complex process of the creation
and formation of 14 new states by rearranging territorially the princely
states, provinces, centrally administered territories and various
scattered regional centres of power. In this context, it is important to
keep in mind Nehru’s own dilemmas and anxieties over the ‘language
question’ which had gained a certain degree of political legitimacy
in the nationalist discourse since the 1920s onward. Furthermore,
it is crucial to understand Nehru’s vision of a linguistically unified
 Asha Sarangi

India as part of the state rationalisation exercise in the spheres of

economy, education, administration, culture, law and so on. Perhaps
one should ask as to what extent this kind of reorganisation of states
initiated the political processes related to the creation of an expansive
democratic–communicative public sphere where the Nehruvian
consensual polity could mature and affect the subsequent working of
a new political order. As a result of it, competing political discourses
and strategic political practices began to take shape challenging the
existing caste, class and language alliances. The reconfiguration of the
alliances now had to be accommodated within an emerging regional
consolidation of power derived from continuing assertion of regional
centres of power and authority.
It is important to understand the conceptual framework —
discursively and politically — within which Nehru tried to manage the
burden of reorganisation soon after becoming the first prime minister
of independent India. For this, I situate Nehru’s own thinking on this
question philosophically and historically. In the subsequent sections
of this essay, I take into account Nehru’s political engagement with
the question of reorganisation of states and his vision of a democratic
India. He spent a great deal of his time dealing with this subject for
almost three decades in his active political life, both before and after
independence. In this regard, we see Nehru engaging with the category
of language not in terms of an instrumental communicative form but
as a philosophical concept which provides an understanding about
the multiple world-views and cultural habitus. His own upbringing in
India and England deeply influenced his initial association and
reflection
over this subject. After independence, it took him sometime to
understand and subsequently act upon the given complex political and
social dynamics surrounding the political, cultural and administrative
restructuring of the Indian state as a political community. He knew
that the territorial re-demarcation and political integration of India
after independence would unfold the twin processes of nationalisation
and regionalisation of identities based primarily on language, class,
caste, religion and region in the states.
Nehru was aware of the multilingual social fabric of the country. He
partially understood the structural power relationship existing among
different language communities in the country. For him, language
embodies cultural representation endowed with meaning-system
and a thick complex symbolic order. He once said that ‘language
helps us to think, it is a semi-frozen thought, and it also helps us to
 Nehru and the Reorganisation of States

exchange our thoughts’. On numerous occasions, Nehru expressed

his thoughts on this subject in his writings and speeches. He strongly
believed that language could be identical to culture, and often alluded
to the complications arising out of translation of words in different
languages. In this regard, he mildly ridiculed the colonial rulers who
called Indian languages vernaculars. In fact, he wrote a long piece in
Bombay Chronicle about the term vernacular as being associated with
vulgar and unrefined or slave language which, he thought, even some
Indians had accepted and started using it for placing Indian languages
in their hierarchical relationship with English — the language of
colonial masters. Nehru criticised those who played on Hindi–Urdu
conflict and reminded them that:
those who loved language as the embodiment of culture, of any thought
caught in the network of words and phrases, of ideas crystallised, of
fine shades of meaning, of music and rhythm that accompany it, of
the fascinating history and association of its words, of the picture
of life in all its phases, those to whom a language is dear because of
all this and more, wondered at this vulgar argument and kept away
from it (Gopal and Iyenger 2003: 495).

Nehru’s ancestors were the learned men of Arabic, Persian and

Sanskrit languages. Raj Kaul, his great-great grand father, who migrated
around the year 1716 from Kashmir to Delhi at the invitation of the
Mughal emperor, was a distinguished scholar. Even his father Motilal
Nehru, who was educated at home until the age of 12, had learnt
Persian and Arabic languages. Nehru appears to be more at ease with
these languages than Hindi or Sanskrit. Being a Brahmin and learning
these languages was associated with symbol of early Hindu–Muslim
syncretic cultural traditions widely prevailing at that time. Nehru,
educated at home until the age of 15, was taught Hindi and Sanskrit
along with an intensive teaching of English language and training in
the western education and mannerism. He gradually learnt Urdu and
felt more at home in this language than Hindi or Sanskrit. His natural
inclination towards Urdu was partially due to his father’s knowledge of
Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic languages, and probably on account of his
childhood care provider who knew Urdu very well. During his years
of life spent in various prisons where he also learnt minimum Urdu, he
kept himself engaged with a variety of readings mostly in the English
language and very little in Hindi. Brown characterises him as someone
who ‘was perhaps, above all, an intellectual in an imperial world, in a
way that none of them were’ (Brown 2006: 69–81). Even though Nehru,
unlike many of his contemporaries, was not so well entrenched into
the local fields of politics, but with ‘his fine command of the nuances
of English and his ease with British administrators and politicians,
he had also become a man of huge communication skills when faced
with large audiences and when required to speak Hindi/Hindustani’.
In his autobiography written during his ninth-term imprisonment in
the Ahmednagar Fort, Nehru expresses his anxiety and hesitation to
speak in Hindi and underlines the fact as to how he felt more
comfortable
with Urdu than with the Hindi or Sanskrit language. Nehru, at
times, accounts for his own elitist position on the language issue as
a result of his anglicised upbringing, particularly with regard to the
learning of English and other languages. The values of cultural
syncretism
and secularism made him sensitive towards the understanding of
multilingual traditions of India ever since he started learning Hindi,
Sanskrit, Urdu and English at home. While learning languages, he
thought about various aspects of a language such as translation, power
of words, the future national language or lingua franca of India and
the position of English in independent India. Keeping this intellectual
universe of Nehru in mind helps us, to some extent, in understanding
and assessing Nehru’s continuous involvement in language politics
during the independence struggle and afterwards. As Judith Brown
suggests that Nehru has been considered
an outsider to the Indian political world and unlike many of his
contemporaries,his entry into the Indian national movement and politics
was not routed through a conventional passage of local and regional
networks and experiences. His westernized education along with his
legal profession equipped and prepared him well to adjust with the
political colleagues of his times. He carried on easily and comfortably
with his contemporary western intellectuals and political leaders to
an extent that ‘the departing British felt particularly that they could
do business and least because, at so many levels, he spoke the same
language and operated in the same way as they did’ (2006: 77).

Robert King rightly suggests that ‘language always mattered a

great deal to Nehru as a writer of books, as a former journalist, and
as a letter writer of gargantuan proportions’. In his views, ‘Nehru used
language with emotion, but he did not view language with emotion’
(ibid.: 22). Nehru was both a rationalist and a humanist. He was
influenced by the western enlightenment and the spirit of scientific
temper. Parekh thinks that he failed to evolve a coherent and shared
cultural and educational policy which required a kind of political
substantiation. His national ideology, in Parekh’s views, was more
suited to the westernised elites and lacked indigenous grounding and
therefore, to some extent, it suffered from internal coherence. Nehru
appears to be both a statist and a critical modernist. He struggled to
combine a certain sense of morality into the domain of politics too.
There was a sense of public morality and ethical politics in him that
he wanted to envision in his quest for democratic and rational modern
state.1 With the decreasing faith in the language of religion, ‘new,
shared moral vocabularies and commitments had to be invented: and
this could only be done through public, reasoned debate’ (Khilnani
2002: 4795). Khilnani thinks that Nehru exercised to some extent
a sense of ‘reasoned morality’ by balancing out reason through an
argument against instinctive and impulsive decision in his political
career several times but most notably in his concerns for the political
administration of the country, particularly in case of the creation of
new states of the union.
Like in other spheres where the discrimination and disadvantage
of minorities worried Nehru, it was also in the domain of language,
and particularly its politicisation since the 1930s, that upset him
frequently. Furthermore, his reluctance to accept the demand for the
creation of linguistic states soon after independence was indicative of
his reservations about associating languages and cultures symbolically
in a more exclusivist manner. In his views, language could remain
a marker of distinctive cultural identity but should not necessarily
become a fundamental basis for creating separate states. Similarly,
Nehru’s careful consideration and retention of English for 15 years
after 1950 was partially due to his fear about the linguistic break-up of
the country with the rise of communalisation over language politics
in the aftermath of the partition in 1947. Keeping English for the time
being allayed fears of people belonging to the non-Hindi dominated
states and earned a certain degree of democratic legitimacy for his
leadership. He was never in favour of the Sanskritisation of Hindi or
making Hindi as an exclusive national or official language. However,
he was extremely concerned about linguistic minorities in the country,
and therefore rejected any idea of an imposition of Hindi, English
or any other language without the popular mandate accorded for it
in due course of time. He, as Judith Brown rightly suggests, ‘found
agitations on language issues distasteful and immature’ (2003: 284).
Nehru himself declared in parliament that ‘it was the over-enthusiasm
of the leaders of the Hindi groups which came in the way of the spread
of Hindi’ (Dasgupta 1970: 226).
Nehru’s contribution to the state-formation processes immediately
after independence needs to be examined in the context of state security
and stability in post-partitioned India. He was preoccupied with the
internal reorganisation and coherence of India as a newly independent
democratic nation–state, and thus the feasibility and durability of
linguistic states was a matter of serious consideration for him and for
several other nationalists. Nehru’s initial reluctance to give in to the
demands for linguistic states was based on a number of political and
administrative reasons. James Manor suggests that:
[I]t is in some ways remarkable that he held out against this, since
Congress had been using linguistic regions as the basis for its regional
organisation units for fully 30 years. As a result, Congressmen from
linguistic groups, that were rendered disadvantaged minorities by
provincial borders inherited from British India, assumed that a revision
of borders was only a matter of time and natural justice …. Nehru was
also encouraged by the way in which States Reorganisation strengthened
Congress in most regions. The party reaped the credit for the gains
that accompanied this rationalisation of government. For example,
most people now found that the language of administration and of law
courts was (at least at subordinate level) their own language and not
that of a neighbouring region to which British rulers had attached them
a century and a half earlier. What he probably did not realise was that
States Reorganisation also produced another sort of rationalisation
that reinforced the power within Congress of locally dominant
landowning groups. Each linguistic region in India tends to possess
something like a single distinct caste system. … In general and over the
medium term at least, States Reorganisation consolidated the hold of
dominant landowning castes both in supra-local politics and in the
villages (1990: 35–38).
Nehru’s initial hesitation in acceding to the demand for linguistic states
should be understood within his own fears, anxieties and dilemmas
over narrow sectarian and exclusive feelings using the language of
cultural nationalism. Khilnani rightly tells us:
After partition, Nehru feared that any redrawing of India’s internal
boundaries along such lines would further endanger the country’s unity.
He asserted as much in the early sessions of the Constituent Assembly.
But over a period of several years, in the face of protests (often violent)
as well as arguments, he came to revise his views on the matter. Nehru
 often has been criticised for being dilatory and evasive on this subject:
in fact, by temporising and by refusing to give in immediately to
impassioned popular demands, by allowing positions to be stated and
gradually revised, he enabled a more satisfactory solution to emerge
— one that actually strengthened the union and that has endured
remarkably well (Khilnani 2002).
Nehru’s preference, however reluctantly, for the formation of
linguistic
states was partially driven by rational criteria and was not based
on emotional appeals or factors. He initially feared that the linguistic
affinities could potentially turn chauvinistic. He did not emphasise
much about the mother tongue education or Indian languages’ learning
and curricula in the schools. This could be because he himself was far
removed from Indian languages and had been a product of western
liberal education in the English language. It was Gandhi who had
earlier resisted the dominant imposition of English which he associated
with the colonial mindset. Nehru was not too happy with the merger
of Mumbai city into the state of Maharashtra, and did not take into
confidence Ambedkar’s views on the linguistic states as the latter had
specific ideas about the future of states and their reorganisation on the
linguistic basis. When the SRC was constituted in 1953 to look into
the demands for the linguistic states, Nehru categorically expressed
his views in a small article published in Times of India of 23 April
1953 stating: ‘In a linguistic state, what would remain for the smaller
communities to look to? Can they hope to be elected to the legislature?
Can they hope to maintain a place in the state service?
These questions and concerns on the part of Nehru regarding the
possibility of the creation of linguistic states kept bothering him for
quite sometime. He, therefore, warned against the risks of language-
based communalism since communalisation on the basis of religion
had already intensified by then. Nehru was aware of this possibility
and hence hesitated to accept the demands for linguistic states. He
wondered as he did in his memorandum submitted to the Linguistic
Provinces Commission in 1948 that the ‘Constitution should provide
that the official language of every province should be the same as the
official language of the central government. It is only on that footing
that I am prepared to accept the demand for Linguistic Provinces’
(Noorani 2002). Nehru did not see any inequality between Hindi and
Urdu; instead he considered both of these languages having equal
status, and suggested that Urdu be given greater encouragement as it
was ‘essentially an Indian language’ (ibid. 2003).
 Nehru dwells upon the language question in his Glimpses of World
History, the book written for Indira — his daughter — during his days
in the prison. In this book written in the form of letters to his daughter,
Nehru talks about history of India and the world narrating the major
events of the world history to her. While writing about the linguistic
diversity of India, he seems to be in awe of India’s numerous languages
and dialects and the historical vitality of literatures and languages. He
seems to be concerned about their political protection and preservation,
and writes to his daughter in the following manner:
Perhaps you know that the National Congress, unlike the British
Government, has divided India on the basis of language. This is far
better, as it brings one kind of people, speaking one language and
generally having similar customs, into one provincial area …. There
can be no doubt that in future provincial divisions of India a great deal
of attention will be paid to the language of the area (Nehru 2004).

Regarding the conflict over Hindi and Urdu that Nehru too witnessed
during the decade of 1920–1930, he considers Hindustani as a viable
solution and possibly an alternative to the language question turning
communal, and hence suggests:
Urdu is a variation of Hindi and word Hindustani is used to mean
both Hindi and Urdu. Thus the principal languages of India are just
ten—Hindustani, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Kanarese,
Malayalam, Uriya and Assamese. Of these, Hindustani which is
our mother tongue, spoken all over northern India — in the Punjab,
United Provinces, Bihar, Central Provinces, Rajputana, Delhi and
Central India …. Hindustani is understood in most parts of India. It
is likely to become the common language of India. …The only way
for a people to grow, for their children to learn, is through their own
language (ibid.: 27).

Nehru’s speeches during the years of 1949–1964 reveal to us his initial

fears, confusions and ambiguities over the future of linguistically
reorganised states in independent India. He says that, ‘in India some
kind of reorganisation of the provinces should take place to fit in
more with the cultural, geographical and economic conditions of
the people and with their desires’ (Government of India 1949: 36).
Nehru did see the possibility of one language emerging as the
most powerful one in independent India but believed that ‘a
languageultimately grows from the people, its seldom that it can
be imposed … the surest way of developing a natural all India
language is not so much to pass resolutions and laws on the subject
but to work to that end in other ways’ (ibid.). In this regard, he
considered
a political party such as the Congress to be able to work towards
this goal of reconstituting provinces on the linguistic basis. He was not
in a hurry to reconstitute different states linguistically. He conceded
the demand for Andhra state a bit reluctantly with his worries about
the city of Madras, and the future of Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Nehru’s concerns during these critical years were predominantly
for unity and integrity of the country. He favoured a more consensual
democratic and popular support base for the reorganisation of the
states rather than adopting a top-down, state-driven and an imposed
strategy for creation of new states. He had his own confusions about
the prospects of having linguistically reorganised states in newly
independent India when he said:
It (linguistic provinces) would be dangerous at any time but it’s more so
at a time when the world is on the verge of a crisis. One doesn’t know
what tomorrow or the day after might bring for us to unsettle or uproot
the whole of India on the basis of a theoretical approach or linguistic
division seems to me an extraordinary unwise thing (Government of
India 1954).

Nehru did not favour radical change in the boundaries of the provinces
since the principle of linguistic demarcation of provinces was not
acceptable as an exclusive principle of state reorganisation to him.
He reiterated that, ‘If a particular demand is considered reasonable,
you can give effect to it. But to say that you should give effect to a
particular principle all over India has no meaning. … I don’t quite
see why the political boundary should necessarily be a linguistic
one (ibid.: 59). It was for this very reason that he did not favour
Uttarakhand or a Sikh province.
If a similar demand (the one like Andhra) is made in the case of
Uttarakhand, I would strongly oppose it. I would also oppose a Sikh
province. But claims like those of Andhra or Karnataka or Kerala or
Maharashtra have my concurrence. … The only way to settle disputes
about linguistic provinces is to consider them in a spirit of goodwill.
A plebiscite shouldn’t necessarily solve everything (ibid.: 61–62).
 About the question of determining the boundaries of these linguistic
states, Nehru showed a great degree of ambiguity and uncertainty to
some extent.
I might straightaway say that I am not greatly interested where a
particular state boundary is situated and I find it very difficult to get
passionate or excited about it. … Infinitely more important is what
happens on either side of the boundary, what happens within the
state — more especially in the great multilingual or bilingual areas and
what happens to people inside a particular state who may,
linguistically
or in any other sense, form a minority (Government of India 1958).

We can see that Nehru did not favour the linguistic principle for the
reorganisation of states and put his views strongly when he said
that ‘may I say pointedly and precisely that I dislike that principle
absolutely the way it has tended to go?’ (ibid.: 172). Speaking about the
impossibility of demarcating rigid linguistic areas and regions from
the existing multilingual areas, Nehru pointed out that ‘wherever
you may draw your line, you do justice to one group and injustice
to another’. He was not much concerned with boundaries but rather
with two things primarily — the question of principles and the
manner of approach to problems. It is in this regard that he considered
Mumbai and Punjab as the two most important issues in the matter
of reorganisation of states. He emphasised:
It does not matter how you divide or sub-divide one state or two or
three or four states. That is a matter which we could consider on
administrative, economic, linguistic or other grounds but I attach the
greatest importance to language though I refuse to associate it
necessarily
with a state (ibid.: 179).

However, at the same time, Nehru weighed the dis/advantages of

both unilingual and multilingual states. Unlike Ambedkar, he did not
favour the principle of linguism in totality. For Nehru, on the other
hand, an idea of language was central to the category of culture, and
culture can be multilingual. He was reconciled to the idea of creating
and adjusting territories of the states when he said:
What does it matter if a patch of Bihar goes this way and a patch of
Bengal or Orissa goes the other way? I can’t get excited about it provided
always that they get fair treatment …. The Maharashtrians, Gujaratis
and others are the people who have to reside there, and who am I to push
 my opinion down their throats, more especially the Maharashtrians who
have played such a vital role in India’s history and who have to play such
a vital part in the future of India? ... ‘The division of India into four, five
or six major groups regardless of language but always, I will repeat,
giving the greatest importance to the languages in those areas … The
importance of the development of a language and linguistic boundaries
are not the same thing (ibid.: 180–93).

Nehru pointed out that various Indian languages would be used in

the state administration and education in terms of integrating people
into the developmental agenda of the Indian state. He was hopeful
that the scientific and technical knowledge and vocabulary could be
learnt and communicated in the Indian languages as easily as in the
English language. He once remarked, ‘I am convinced that real mass
progress in India can only be made through our own languages and
not through a foreign language’ (Government of India 1958: 424).2
He continued to emphasise that it was not English but an Indian
language that should become the principal medium of education
in India which, he suggested, could be imparted either by Hindi or
some other regional language. He made it clear that ‘Hindi must be
given every encouragement to grow and be used for education and
administrative purposes …. (And) English should be a compulsory
second or third language’ (ibid.: 425). He even thought that knowing
a foreign language would not harm the progress and growth of Indian
languages. Regarding the numerical strength of a language, he said:
Every language has an equal right to prevail; even if it is a minority
language in the country provided it is spoken by a good number of
people…It is the primary responsibility of the majority to satisfy the
minority in every matter…It’s a most desirable custom to give statutory
protection to minorities. It is sometimes right that you should do that
to give encouragement, for example, to backward classes, but it is not
good in the long run. It is the duty and responsibility of the majority
community whether in the matter of language or religion to pay
particular attention to what the minority wants and to win it over. The
majority is strong enough to crush the minority which might not be
protected. Therefore, whenever such a question arises, I am always in
favour of the minority (ibid.: 177).

Similarly, regarding the Punjabi language and its conflict with Hindi,
he said, ‘There is no question of its being at the expense of Hindi.
Hindi is strong enough, wide enough and powerful enough in every
way to go ahead’ (ibid.: 181). From 1920s onwards, Nehru remained
engaged with the language question and had interlocutors in Gandhi,
Rajgopalachari, Abdul Haq and many other nationalists over the
conflict between Hindi and Urdu, and over the acceptance or rejection
of Hindustani language. The socialist Nehru seems to have learnt a
few things from the linguistic reconstruction programmes undertaken
in the former USSR immediately after the revolution. The new
Russian state worked to establish written forms of various languages
which were earlier only spoken and did not have fully established and
developed orthographical rules as well as terminological systems. In
this context, language planning was used for educational purposes by
the Communist Party of Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin
who urged the use of the mother tongue for purposes of education for
the people of Russia on an urgent basis. In this regard, wide-ranging
scientific and practical measures were taken to ensure the creation
and realisation of alphabets for more than 50 national languages
that had not previously been written down. Nehru too thought that
reorganisation probably would establish the languages of education in
these states in a more determinate manner and thus create a democratic
public space for every one to be educated in the language of the state.
The Nehruvian model of development ensured that his government
gave grants for officially compiling the terminologies, translations and
dictionaries of dominant regional languages.
On 27 November 1947, in the Constituent Assembly, Nehru as a
prime minister of the country accepted the principles underlying the
demand for linguistic provinces. It was about 20 years ago in 1928 when
the Nehru report had emphasised the desirability of creating linguistic
provinces. Nehru’s consent for setting up the first Linguistic Provinces
Commission known as the Dhar Commission on 17 June 1948, which
submitted its report to the Government of India on 10 December 1948,
once again reconfirmed the idea of linguistic provinces, linguistic
areas and their boundaries with particular focus on states of Kerala,
Karnataka, Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai. The report stated the
financial positions of the proposed provinces and their economic and
administrative restructuring. By 1958, he seems to have come out of
his anxieties on reorganisation and his fears of linguistic chauvinism
begin to disappear. It became apparent to him that within each of the
newly formed states, heterogeneous conflicts of caste, class, region
and culture would soon begin to affect the formation of larger political
and cultural communities. The process of the reorganisation of states
could be seen as a kind of state rationalisation exercise consolidating
regional and local level alliances through a common vocabulary of
administrative and political institutions and practices. This was made
possible through numerous policies and programmes of state-building
exercise using a common language of administration, education, law
and the institutions. He cautioned that the reorganisation process
should not be carried out without certain restraints.
The years of state formation — 1947–1956 — were not just a long
decade of development but also of political experiments, alliances,
social unrest and cultural resurgence, and addressed a number of
complex
and somewhat messy problems related to the notions of territory,
geography, language, region, culture and the emerging alliances among
them at various levels. The SRC collected 1, 50, 250 documents from
different parts of the country and considered factors like cost of change,
unity and security of India; linguistic cultural bases of group and
community identity; and financial viability of reorganising different
regions and states which then existed. It finally arranged 28 states
into 14 states, and integrated 543 princely states in the reorganised
political order. The question of cultural homogeneity within dense
social diversity failed to generate any sustainable consensus at this
time. Issues like whether the reorganised multilingual states would
be administratively strong and durable, and which language/s would
become language/s of administration, education, economy, occupation
and law in these existing multilingual states remained subject of intense
debates and discussions. Over the issue of big versus small states, Nehru
even said that ‘small states will have small minds’. These were Nehru’s
years of tremendous fears, anxieties and dilemmas, which along with
his indecisiveness, affected and overshadowed the formative years
of the formation of states. Subsequent to the submission of the SRC
report in 1956 and its partial implementation, another decade of events
followed framing the language policy of the country. In 1959, Nehru
made a statement in the Parliament in the following words, ‘I would
have English as an alternative language as long as people require it,
and I would leave the decision … to the non-Hindi knowing people.’
Nehru’s remark that all scheduled languages were to be the national
languages of the country provided an agenda for initiating the official
language policy for the country. Subsequent to critical events like the
formation of Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960, and the language
riots in Tamil Nadu in 1963, an Official Language Bill was placed
in the Parliament. Nehru gave a passionate speech on the language
issue while discussing this bill. It subsequently led to the passing of
the Official Language Amendment Bill in 1965 which made English
an associate official language of the country for an indefinite period.
In 1962, the Emotional Integration Committee submitted its report
recommending a comprehensive multilingual educational and social
policy framework for developing sustainable emotional bond between
the people and the Indian state. Nehru stressed the point that the real
mass progress in India could only be made through their language
and not through a foreign language. This was reflected in numerous
initiatives that he took in institutionalising the larger language and
cultural policy in independent India. It was in this context that the
question of linguistic minorities and the preservation and protection of
their languages was raised and thought over, keeping in mind the idea
of democratic rights and representation of several linguistic-cultural
minorities. The reports of the first Official Language Commission
in 1956, and that of the Emotional Integration Committee in 1962,
with the latter specifying provisions for multilingual school
education,
writing of school textbooks, formation of youth organisations,
implementation of a three-language formula into the school curricula,
were interpreted as safeguards against the communalisation of
languagepolitics which had started manifesting itself in different parts
of the country by then. The widespread language riots in Tamil Nadu
in the mid-1960s agitated the minds of various language nationalists
in the country. However, the subsequent retention of English after
1965 ensured that the linguistic hegemony of Hindi would not stand
in the way of the democratisation of language politics in the years to
follow. Nehru’s consent for the continuation of English language,
non-Sanskritisation of Hindi and an insistence to include Urdu in
the Eighth Schedule was a testimony of his favouring the historical
linguistic plurality and diversity of the country.
The story of the reorganisation of states, as it unfolded, tells us
about the processes leading to the remaking of India as a political
community. Nehru carefully thought over categories such as nation,
state, community and identity in most of his writings. He was more
concerned about establishing the interlinkages between cultural and
political spaces of power. In his view, the dynamic political order of
reorganisation in post-partitioned India also needed to understand
the relationship between political legitimation and collective
representation
of regional as well as national identities. Besides, the new
political order had to navigate through the acute dilemma over the
enclosuresof these multiple identities in the bureaucratic administrative
rationale of the state on the one hand, and the power of the politics
and culture on the other. For him, the given linguistic diversity of
India would certainly promote the unity of India provided a scheme
of general mass education and the cultural development of people is
envisioned and pursued properly (Gopal and Iyenger 2003: 495).
Therefore, the reorganisation process had to remain within the
Nehruvian model of statecraft along with constitutional design of
planned economy, cultural plurality and political-territorial integrity of
the country. He preferred to wait for the reorganisation of other states
including that of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Punjab. Reorganisation
was a state-building exercise which would eventually design an idea of
the Indian nation being a fully grown and organically involved entity
within the culture, economy and society of the country. However, as
Khilnani has reminded, Nehru’s delays and dilemmas on this matter
and in his subsequent acceptance of the SRC’s recommendations were
more due to the widespread passions raised over the language issue.
He considered the question of language rights and responsibilities as
a part of the protection of cultural rights of social communities. He
seemed to subscribe to the view that language could remain a marker
of distinctive cultural identity but not become a ground for creating
a separate state. For Nehru, language belonged to the universe of
thoughts, and therefore any political ordering and structuring would
only do a great deal of harm to it. In his speech at Bangalore in October
1955, Nehru made an emotional appeal in the following manner:
We should not become parochial, narrow minded, provincial,
communaland caste-minded because we have a great mission to perform.
Let us, the citizens of this Republic of India, stand up straight with
straight backs and look up at the skies keeping our feet firmly planted on
the ground, and bring about this synthesis, this integration of the Indian
people. Political integration has already taken place to some extent, but
what I am after is something much deeper than that — an emotional
integration of the Indian people so that we might be welded into one,
and made into one strong national unit, maintaining at the same time
all our wonderful diversity (Government of India 1958: 173).
 Nehru not only favoured socialist planning but also a planned
development which involved more rational and bureaucratic structures
and practices of phased growth and progress of the country. For him,
language symbolised culture and a pattern of meanings, and cultural
borders could be possibly imagined through linguistic borders with
the latter having the potential of defining and limiting the political
order of the state boundaries. It is therefore not surprising to see Nehru
accepting the process of reorganisation of states as part of the state
rationalisation — not to be considered simply as an administrative
affair but having significant impact in the spheres of culture, economy,
religion, education, law and administration. Stuart Hall (1997) reminds
us that nations are ‘systems of cultural representations’, and we find how
Nehru too locates a bond between language and history, language and
culture and language and polity that needed to be understood along
these terrains. It was this relationship of the political in the language
politics
that Nehru thought about and reflected upon seriously. The
Nehruvian developmental state became an organised administrable
state which had to settle with the plurality of rights, representations
and identities. His support and acceptance of the SRC report within
less than a decade after independence has to be understood within this
logic of the developmental state. The SRC opened up the space for
the politics of people, of the governed, whereby the state needed to
legitimise itself through the domain of cultural and political identity.
It was to ease and provide a certain degree of political consciousness
for collective action with limited access to political bargaining and
engineering on the part of the regional political elites and the national
leadership at the centre.
It is probably right to suggest that these years of Nehruvian
consensussuggest the possibility of creating a communicative public sphere
of sovereign political subjects who would engage with the state over
matters of identities, rights and community identity in independent
India. Nehru’s efforts in this regard open up some kind of a dialogical
space which could sort out the domains of conflicts and compromises
in a given political context. The Nehruvian legacy in terms of the
formation of states of India — transition and transformation from an
imperial colony to an independent sovereign state — is about the state-
building exercise. State and nation-building were political exercises
requiring distinctive modes and modalities of political, economic,
cultural and social processes with their close and related political and
cultural linkages. Nehru looked at the former state of USSR to further
think through this question. Both Russia and India in this case provided
rich and conceptually nuanced understanding about the conflictual
or consensual relationship between language, public sphere, civil
society and state. For Nehru, the important question was to strike a
balance between linguistic cultural plurality and political centrality in
a secular, participative and democratic manner. For this, in 1955 he
sent S. G. Barve, Secretary of the first Official Language Commission
to the former USSR for understanding the language policy as a state
reconstruction programme, and to place his views before the SRC
before its recommendations were implemented in 1956. This could
be achieved, in his views, by refashioning the scale of hierarchies of
regions and languages in case of India and nationalities in Russia as
the careful understanding of the language question in both of these
diverse and complex multilingual countries in the world had already
suggested ways to manage the affairs of education, administration,
economy, law and politics.
The state-building exercise includes setting up of various political
institutions and formal structures of the state on the one hand, and
initiating the democratic political practices on the other. For this,
political institutions need to be restructured within the cultural habitus
of the social order to create critical spaces for new political public
spheres and their subjects. The idea of a nation indicates an organic
exercise which requires deepening and strengthening of bonds, trusts,
loyalties, and a degree of ethical-political reckoning in the realms
of rights, representation, recognition of freedom, dignity, human
justice and equality, etc. The Indian state and its various constitutive
units needed to create political institutions to guard and legitimate
political processes and practices. Unlike the state, the nation was a
discursive construct in Nehru’s views, and needed a certain kind of
political institutional structure that would help in articulating a set
of imaginaries with which it could be identified initially. An idea of
nation as systems of cultural representations could be possible through
linguistic reconstruction of the past and its history, culture, tradition
and memory, etc. Identifiers such as language, culture, religion, region,
caste and class facilitated this process of discursive evocation of the
Indian nation. In this process, the twin processes of mythologising
and demythologising of the nation take place simultaneously. Such
a discursive process also prescribes a certain degree of cultural
inclusion
through specific political practices. Nehru seems to be asking
his fellow colleagues and countrymen to maintain a balance between
traditional particularistic ethnic loyalties on the one hand and modern
universalistic legal rational order on the other. Nehru wanted to build
a democratic and cultural apparatus, having not just reorganised states
but also their linguistic, political, administrative, territorial, economic
and even psychological integration and consolidation.

Notes
1. Sunil Khilnani considers Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru as belonging to the
tradition of ‘public reason’ and as ‘men who tried to find the basis for
auniversalist morality and politics’. All three of them wondered as ‘how to
construe the relation between political power and the presence of multiple
faiths’. See Khilnani (2002).
2. It is in this context that he called the English knowing system as the new
caste system.

References
Brown, Judith. 2003. Nehru: A Political Life. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2006. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the British Empire: The Making of an
“Outsider” in Indian Politics’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
29 (1): 69–81.
Dasgupta, Jyotirindra. 1970. Language Conflict and National Development:
Group Politics and National Language Policy in India . Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Gopal, S. and Uma Iyenger. ed. 2003. The Essential Writings of J. Nehru. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Government of India. 1949. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. 1, September
1946–May 1949. Delhi: The Publications Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting.
———. 1954. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches , vol. 2, 1949–1953. Delhi: The
Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
———. 1958. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. 3, March 1953–August
1957. Delhi: The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting.
Hall, Stuart. ed. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices. London: Sage Publication.
Khilnani, Sunil. 2002. ‘Nehru’s Faith’, Economic and Political Weekly , 37 (48):
4793–99.
King, Robert D. 1997. Nehru and the Language Politics of India. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Manor, James. 1990. ‘How and Why Liberal and Representative Politics
Emerged in India’, in Political Studies, 38 (1): 20–38.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. 2003. ‘The Question of Language’, in S. Gopal and Uma
Iyenger (ed.), The Essential Writings of J. Nehru, pp. 495. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
———. 2004. Glimpses of World History . Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd.
Noorani, A. G. 2002. ‘Nehru and Linguistic States’, Frontline, 19 (16), 3–16
August, Chennai.
———. ed. 2003. The Muslims of India: A Documentary Record. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
 2
Rule, Governmental Rationality and
Reorganisation of States
Ranabir Samaddar

To rule means to rule people which also means (in most of history)
to rule a territory. But just like rule has to be appropriate to the nature
of a particular people, similarly the nature of a territory also has to
be appropriate. Or, and it is the same thing to say, that the rule must
fit the people and the territory. In this sense ‘right size’ and ‘right
people’ become critical factors in rule.
To attempt a fit of right sizing and right peopling, states have
expanded and reduced, changed compositions of populations, expelled
populations, invited populations, reordered rules of succession of a
state, tried to achieve political and cultural homogenisation, accepted
arbitration, imposed new controls, and managed territories through
grant of various types of autonomous arrangements. For right
peopling within the borders, the most effective instrument has been
land control policy. Land acquisition, and as its ancillary strategy
encouraging mass flight have been one of the most used policies
of the state. Right peopling has also meant policies on minorities,
immigration policy, personal laws, population policy, and here again
a reordering of internal boundaries to accommodate right people or
achieve a right-peopled arrangement of the national space. Right
sizing often connects to right shaping in such context. A production
of ‘ethnic’ majority needs movement of boundaries within the state;
such a movement can cause instability to the external borders also.
Ethnic boundaries may mean redrawing of linguistic, regional, and
religious borders within the country — and all these have to result in
redrawing of territorial boundaries of different types. In short, from the
angle of the state, there is always a ‘right’ size. There can be nothing
more material in politics than achieving this right size. And, at times,
this process can be violent.
Territory in this way appears as the kernel of the nation, because
territory is the congealed form of the relations existing between
 Rule, Governmental Rationality and Reorganisation of States

resources, available labour mass, borders, the numerical strength

of the population and its composition. If the desire to achieve fit
betweenpeople and territory produces nation, making the size right
becomes a matter of government. All nations slide into governmental
rationalities, and territory is the clue to governmental imperative of
right sizing, right peopling, and right shaping. It is only when we
understand this process that we shall be able to understand why
so much violence is associated with state formation, which always
includes state reorganisation (of the internal space) and why partition
(in various forms) and the reproduction of partition as a method
(of reorganisation) appears as the mark of a nation coming into age.
In order to understand why partition as a method reproduced
itself, we have to realise that achieving ‘right size’, ‘right people’ and
‘right shape’ of the state are permanent governmental obligations to
find out and achieve. These compulsions form the kernel of
governmental rationalities.1 The obligation of a national administration
is to govern rationally — meaning achieving right-sized and right-
peopled territory — which makes possible for the government to
devise various ways of division and union, violent and less violent,
and continuously pursue the ideal of ‘right shape’. Built on the
governmental mechanism of finding appropriate solutions to the
problem
of difference, the state divests itself, not always dramatically,
indeed many a time gradually, of objects, beings and spaces identified
with federality, dialogue and democracy. The function of finding the
right size, right people and right shape becomes a form of transgression
of the space that the idea of the nation had created in the first place.
The idea of right size, right people and right shape therefore performs
two simultaneous functions — (a) it prescribes the sole manner, the
governmental manner, of discovering the political sacred (the elect
idea of a fit between territory and the people), the particular form of
politics, which will henceforth rule and be worshipped; (b) it removes
at the same time all objects and spaces that do not belong to that
sacred sphere, or at least drives them underground. In such a milieu
of governmental rationality, as I argue elsewhere,2 divisions of space
mark politics with territorialities of various kinds and produce as the
other of the national spaces the hated figure of the migrant.
If we are interested in the materiality of politics, indeed its brutal
physical content, then we must then study events of divisions of space
and creation of new territories from all permissible angles. Thus for
instance, decolonisation was not only the end of old colonialism and
 Ranabir Samaddar

emergence of independent states with given territories and given

populations over which battles had to be fought, but a meeting of
several dimensions and several phenomena, and relational games
resulting from that. It should be clear by now that I am pushing
for a thoroughly relational understanding of the phenomenon of
territoriality.
To chronicle how governmental rationality obliges an
administration
to repeatedly re-shape the territory it administers in search
of the ‘fit’, probably the best point would be to begin with the career
of the Bengal Presidency. The establishment of the Presidency was a
matter of an aftermath of conquest. But the moment the imperatives
of rule appeared, the fortunes of Presidency, an administrative unit,
started taking unpredictable turns — a history at the heart of which lies
the event of the first Bengal Partition of 1905 that lasted till 1911.
The Presidency of Fort William through which British colonial
rule had established itself primarily had quickly become in no time a
huge single administrative unit — from river Sutlej in the north-west
to Assam in the north-east and the Arakan Hills in the south-east.
With an enormous mass of population inhabiting this area, without
any effective central administration, local insurgencies and other
disturbances often rearing their heads, and local cultural-political
identities clamouring for recognition, the Charter Act of 1833 created
a separate Presidency, the Agra Presidency, later renamed as the
Northwestern Provinces. Yet the Bengal Presidency remained huge
and ungovernable. A separate secretariat was created for Bengal in
1843. In 1853, local government was taken away from the office of
the Governor General and a Lieutenant Governor was appointed
for Bengal. Yet, calamities like the Famine of 1866, and the peasant
mutinies between 1845 and 1875 proved the inadequacy of the
remedy of 1853 for toning up the administration of Bengal. Arakan
was separated from Bengal in 1862, again for better administration,
and was included in the newly created Chief Commissionership of
Burma. And then in 1874 the districts of Cachar, Sylhet, Goalpara
and the Garo Hills were separated from Bengal and put in Assam
that became a Chief Commissioner’s province. A fixed frontier
policy in respect of Arakan, Chittagong, Cachar and Lushai Hills
was formulated. But Assam remained inconvenienced by the lack of
trained administrative personnel, and the Chin-Lushai Conference of
1892 in the background of annexation of the Lushai Hills decided
to lessen further the existing administrative burden on Bengal by the
transfer of Chittagong and Chittagong Hill Tracts from Bengal to
Assam. The construction of the Assam–Bengal Railway was complete.
It was suggested that even Dhaka and Mymensing divisions be also
transferred. All these provided the backdrop of Lord Curzon’s decision
for sweeping readjustment of territorial boundaries in eastern and the
north-eastern parts of British India. His original scheme proposed
inclusion of Chittagong Division, Dhaka, Mymensing, Faridpur,
Bakargunj, Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Jalpaiguri and Malda in
Assam, which was to be now a new province. Subsequently amended,
Curzon’s final proposal of partition of Bengal in 1905 was an amalgam
of reasons of administrative expediency, communal considerations,
of political control over the rising nationalist sentiments in Bengal,
recognition of linguistic communities and a new frontier policy to
the north-east. Initially both Hindus and Muslims opposed partition
of Bengal, but later, organised Muslim opinion changed its mind.
Meanwhile, Assam acquired its distinct political identity within British
set-up, and Bihar and Orissa became separate units. By the time when
partition was revoked, it was found by the Bengal nationalists that
the most important political-administrative arrangement in British
Empire in India had been substantially restructured. The capital had
been transferred from Calcutta to Delhi, and one could see the first
hints of a subsequent state reorganisation of independent India. The
first partition had laid the blueprint for the second one — at least in
the East.
In this context, we can recall the instance of Hyderabad. We can
recall how the state of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956 after
the integration of the former ‘princely state of Hyderabad’ into the
Indian Union (1948), and its subsequent merger with the Andhra
region. The story goes that on the basis of agrarian radicalism and
the establishment of the nationality principle (Telugu language), the
state was established. Yet today the modalities of the integration of
the sub-regions (Andhra and Telengana) into a region and the region’s
integration with the Indian Union, which were marked by specific
historical circumstances since the time of the colonial rule till date,
have now suddenly become a matter of controversy. As we know,
the regime of the Nizam had prevented the emergence of distinct
political subjects and the political articulation of cultural and other
differences in the state of Hyderabad, while in the Andhra region
British rule occasioned the development of national political parties
based on the criteria of social, linguistic or religious representation.
In 1948, the integration of the ‘princely state’ into the Indian Union
enjoyed considerable popular support; but this was not the only mark
of the time. A very strong peasant movement led by the Communists
against the feudal system also marked the time of de-colonisation — a
struggle that was called off only in 1951. The central government
chose to implement its integration policy by resorting to force. The
two sub-regions were merged; yet the complexities did not vanish. On
the other hand, they raised their heads in less than 40 years calling
into question the distinct territorial solution achieved by the Indian
government on the issue of right size and right people.
This is the point where we should find more light to make sense of
the process whereby constitutional rule, and not all-out wars of
all against all or aggression from an outside invader would lead to
cataclysmic changes in the internal territorial shape of the country.
After all, the period of operation of the Montague-Chelmsford
constitution
was also the period when political interests consolidated,
and ideas of autonomy, democracy, self-rule and constitutionalism
crystallised and came up against any idea of high nationalism. With
a new system of rule through negotiation of deputations, petitions,
protests, disobediences, limited franchise, provincial elections and
limited representative institutions — please note, all governmental
innovations — the country was to be governed by a set of new
territorial-popular units. And though this system satisfied neither
the constitutionalists, nor the nationalists, not to speak of the
militant
Left, yet the territorial frame of rule had been cast. We have
to remember that this was the classic bind — the deadlock — in
which the moment of partition was to appear. Meanwhile, internal
boundary making continued as a process. Constitutionalists recog-
nised social and cultural boundaries and attempted to negotiate them
with constitutional modes, which included territorial rationalities;
the republicans however disdained such attempts, because in their
mind the nation as the elect-body with differentiating lines to
distinguish
it from others could not brook any other differentiating line
within. Thus it was not surprisingly Jinnah who put the issue of the
right size and right shaping squarely in the nationalist agenda, when
he while invoking the right of the Muslims to self-determination, said
in his presidential address in Lahore in 1940:
Babu Rajendra Prasad ... only a few days ago said, ‘Oh, what more
do the Musalmans want?’ I will read you his words. Referring to the
 minority question, he says: ‘If British would concede our right of self-
determination surely all these differences should disappear.’ How will
our differences disappear?
The word ‘nationalist’ has now become the play of conjurers in politics.
The problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of
an international character, and must be treated as such. So long as this
basic and fundamental truth is not realised, any constitution that may
be built will result in disaster and will prove harmful not only to the
Musalmans, but also to the British and Hindus.
Musalmans are not a minority ... Musalmans are a nation according to
any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their
territory and their State (Hassan 1993: 44–58).

That is the point. ‘They must have their homelands, own territory,
and their own State’. Have we enough understood the significance
of the word ‘homeland’ when discussing states reorganisation? The
imperative to achieve the fit that I am speaking of here, and to govern
various differences on the basis of this fit makes territoriality absolute.
As recent Indian political history shows, conditions of representative
institutions and system reinforce the trend of right sizing and right
peopling. Or, to put the question from another angle, till state is the
locus of self-determination, can the ‘territory people’ combine be the
site on which complex issues of autonomy, right of nationalities,
the global norms of self-determination and political respect of
differences be judged? Or, to put it in even another way, till
governmentalrationality determines the ‘size’, and law is the only way to
achieve that, can we speak of a dialogic polity capable of addressing
differences and injustice? In brief, this is the sort of bind, a situation of
closure, in which continuous reorganisation on the basis of partition
appears as the act of destiny.
Right peopling of course did not end with the Great Partition, and
as I have indicated was not the beginning also. Other identities with
their ‘homelands’ and ‘claims’ to homelands emerged soon. The States
Reorganisation Act was the vindication of the linguistic principle of
nationality on the one hand, and an admission that the governmental
problem of right shaping the territory was perennial on the other.
It is interesting to note how this has been best admitted by the state
itself. The Union Home Ministry’s own chronicle puts the matter
of resizing, right peopling and the right shaping in the light of the
perennial concern for governmental rationality. According to this,
the revolt of the soldiers in 1857–1858 had far reaching result in the
sense that administration had to be now direct, and therefore had
to pass from the East India Company to the Crown. This was the
precursor of the reorganisation of the British Indian Army, and the
British claim of the Doctrine of Paramountcyfor the Princely States.
In 1861 came the Indian Councils Act, the Indian High Courts
Act and the first emergence of the Indian Penal Code soon to be
formalised. The Delhi Durbar was held in 1877. By the second decade
of the next century, provincial autonomy had become a real issue as
borne out by the Montague-Chelmsford Report. In 1921, the Moplah
revolt marked the Malabar region with distinctiveness that of course
took several more decades to achieve formal recognition in forms of
separate districts. And even though the Second Non-Cooperation
Movement was launched, the model of rule had been surely put in
place by the colonial government for independent India to follow. By
1935, the final seal of a territorial design that would combine right size
and the right people was ready. This was the Government of India
Act — Provincial Autonomy. Whatever protests were later organised
and whatever Missions came later to pacify the nationalist
leadership,
the consensus had been firmly laid, a nationally ruled country
on the basis of states that would by the words of the Constitution
would form the Union, that is India (Article 1). It was this vision that
blocked any other alternative vision at that time, be it Rehmat Ali’s
vision of Pakistan and other lands, or Gorkhastan, or any other land
in any other form.3
By 1956, there was another turn to the story of finding the ‘fit’
and ensuring the governmental legitimacy of this fit. Article 1 (1)
of the Indian constitution says, ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a
union of States’. On 26 January 1950, India was proclaimed to be a
republic, not by the President of free sovereign India, but by the last
British Governor General C. Rajagopalachari. In 1956 many states
became union territories, and lost the right of representation in the
presidential elections, and to that extent, in the Parliament of the
Republic. When the Republic was born, it consisted of 27 states as
specified in Parts A, B and C of the First Schedule and the Territory
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands specified in Part D of the same
Schedule. In general, the 9 states of Part A comprised former British
provinces, the 8 states of Part B comprised the former Indian states
(516 out of 522), which had acceded to the Indian Union, and the
10 states of Part C category were the former Chief Commissioner’s
provinces like Delhi and some small Indian states. Yet, only the state
of Jammu and Kashmir (Part B), by virtue of Article 370 could claim
a federal relation with the Union, which otherwise became fully
empowered to give birth to or abolish any state in the union. Cutting
and chopping had immediately begun after 1950 that would end only
in 1956. The First Schedule was amended and Coochbehar State was
abolished and merged in the state of West Bengal. The death of Potti
Shri Ramulu, on fast to secure the state of Andhra Pradesh, hastened
the establishment of the States Reorganisation Commission. The
states were reorganised under the states Reorganisation Act, 1956,
whereby Part B states, except Jammu and Kashmir, and 6 of the Part
C states were merged into other nearby states or reconstituted and
1 new state, Kerala was formed. Three states were formed in the Hindi-
speaking area — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the Madhya Pradesh to
subsequently multiply into 3 states more — Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh
and Jharkhand. The Bombay state so brought about was bilingual
composed of Marathi-and Gujarati-speaking people. The state was
split in 1960 to form the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. In 1966,
the first expression of the limits to the governmental exercise of 1956
was experienced while reorganising Punjab, because Chandigarh
was to go neither to Punjab nor to Haryana and was therefore made
a Union Territory. In 1971 came the reorganisation of the north-east.
In 1975, Sikkim was merged in the Union.
Yet, can we say that the story of reorganising and thereby giving the
right shaping the Union has concluded by and large? The trouble with
this line of thinking, which is dominant, is because according to this
line of argument states reorganisation in India mainly proceeded on
the basis of language. Yet if we examine closely, this too was a case of
governmentality whereby language becoming a tool of administration,
negotiation and governing, rather than wider communications and
inter-cultural translation including governmental needs. Thus language
per se was only half the criterion; mostly where mass movements were
strong in favour of linguistic state and had a long past going back to
the colonial period, linguistic statehood was granted. Rest were
matters
of rationalising the rule. The constitution as we know is vague
in defining the criterion of statehood, does not say what qualifies a
language to be a ‘national language’, ‘official language’ and in
distinguishing
either one from officially adopted regional languages. The
states can adopt their own language of administration and educational
instruction from among the officially recognised languages, that is
the Scheduled Languages. Now of course with reinforcement of the
Official Languages Act of 1963, Hindi can be imposed on unwilling
states by various means, and the rationale for changing and chopping
slices of territories is over in some respects. Before independence in
1947, the Congress was committed to redrawing state boundaries to
correspond with linguistics. But then when the States Reorganisation
Commission issued its report in 1955, and the government requested
the public to offer comments, it produced a flood of petitions. The
violence that broke out in the state of Assam in the early 1980s reflected
the continuing complexities of linguistic and territorial politics in the
country. As I describe in an essay on migration, nationhood and the
problems of rule, Assam claimed that by the 1931 census not only
she had lost a hefty portion of her land to outsiders, but the Assamese
had become a disadvantaged minority in their traditional homeland.
They represented less than 33 per cent of the total population of
Assam, and the Muslim immigrants accounted for roughly 25 per
cent of the population. Assamese–Bengal riots started in 1950, and
it is claimed that in the 1951 census many Bengalis listed Assamese
as their mother tongue in an effort to placate the Assamese. Today a
hundred voices are up for reshaping Assam — of Assamese Muslims,
Bengali Muslims, Assamese Hindus, Bengali Hindus, Plain Tribes,
Hill Tribes and the Nagas. The search goes on for right shape, right
population and the right size.
Meanwhile regional languages have grown strong, and are now
used throughout their respective states for most levels of
administration,
business and social intercourse. Each is associated with a body
of literature, more important with power. In each state, the minority
languages are at a disadvantage. Governments now commission
teaching material, prose compositions, grammars and textbooks, and
ensure wide dissemination of dictionaries to ensure that rule becomes
effective in conditions of everyday speech. Democratisation of rule
has meant a relative end to bilinguality and diglossia, though the
governmental form of linguistic democracy must not make us forget
that the standard regional language may be the household tongue of
only a small group of educated inhabitants of the region’s major urban
centres, which exercise politico-economic hegemony in a region, and
not by village women, dalits, or other low caste people. The new
hegemonies cannot suppress the fact also that only around 4 per cent
of the population can speak in both English and an Indian language,
that there are linguistic minorities who do not speak the state official
language as their mother tongue, and that many people belonging to the
indigenous communities have to be bilingual to survive. Rural–urban
migrants are frequently bilingual. Yet, it is not this linguistic plurality
that has become the mark of democracy, but the new hegemonies of
few languages with access to power and producing power from their
own social configuration through radio, television and the print media.
The more the standardisation now, for all these reasons, the more are
the differences.
Initially, the rulers had thought that reorganisation was a matter of
first, the southern part, then the western and the northwestern parts,
and finally the frontier region in the north-east. Either management
of a macro-capital centre like Mumbai, or curbing insurgency as in
the north-east, provided the immediate occasion. While in all these
the governmental tactic of reshaping the territory on the whole was
successful, it faced three problems — first, linguistic division at times
became close to religious divisions (Punjab–Haryana); second, the
Hindi heartland in the north had remained relatively immune from
any reshaping; and third, the North-Eastern Areas Reorganisation
Act, 1971, which reconstituted the north-east into a number of states,
but could not reorganise the area satisfactorily, as the Act became the
precursor to several demands for distinct tribal ‘homelands’. By 1986,
the conferment of statehood on some of these homelands had been
completed. Of all these, reorganisation of the Hindi–Hindu heartland
proved most difficult, because nationalist strategies of rule were partly
founded on the idea that the stability of geopolitical formations in
the heartland would be essential to preserve the unity of the Indian
‘Union’.
Almost four decades into the prosperity of the Green Revolution
and the growth of the macro-capital regions such as Mumbai, Delhi,
Hyderabad, the reorganisation has taken a different route. Right
size, right people and right shape do not only depend on religion,
language, security, nature of borders and boundaries, and history, but
very directly on growth of capital. Capital cities demand their own
regions, prosperous agricultural regions like the western districts of
Uttar Pradesh demand separate state, a Harit Pradesh; similarly other
regions have begun dusting up the historic clothing; and growth of
capital regions and cities and increase in disparities can now spark
demands for Vindhyachal in Madhya Pradesh, Telangana in Andhra
Pradesh, Vidarbha in Maharashtra, Gorkhaland in West Bengal, and
why not once again in Assam — this time Bodoland. To take the case
of Vidarbha, the origin of the movement for Maha Vidarbha goes as
far back as 1905. At that time, the demand was for the separation of
Marathi population from the Hindi-speaking areas. Later the area
was merged into Maharashtra. But the growth of Mumbai as a
capital region soon instilled the fear that Nagpur and with it the entire
Vidarbha region would be overwhelmed by the Mumbai city — a
fear that came true. Now communalism has complicated the picture.
Vidarbha requires its own land and tenancy laws, currently modelled
on the lines of Maharashtra, and a unification of the Marathi-speaking
districts of Madhya Pradesh. If and when Vidarbha is constituted as a
separate state, it will be the biggest cotton growing area in the country,
making it agriculturally prosperous and viable as an investment site.
Thus we can see that the formation of linguistic states can only be a
limited solution to the necessity of fitting size with people. The problem
is not even whether small or large states are good. Apart from linguistic
minorities languishing everywhere, access to resources makes the shape
and size question politically significant. In view of the common water
disputes, say between Karnataka and arid Tamil Nadu over the share
of Cauvery water, or sharing of waters by Punjab with Haryana and
Rajasthan, or between UP and Delhi, or other resource wars as in
the north-east, the triad of capital, resource, and democracy makes
governmentality in matters of size and shape a distinct feature of
postcolonial
political materiality.
Probably the interaction of capital and the extra-capital spaces had
always been the main factor in the colonial time in the search for the
right size and shape of units. But if this were so, this is now most
evident
with growth of capital once again provoking the reorganisation
of space. Political actors and the political class in general are at a loss
as to how to approach the governmental imperatives of reorganising
space at regular intervals, which at times cause loss of legitimacy, at
times public anger or euphoria, but always create a sense of uncertainty
and the disturbing sense of a task not finally concluded. Why should
the political class accept the governmental rationality — on grounds
of administrative efficiency and democratisation, or on grounds of
linguistic and cultural democracy, or devolution of powers, or the
need to satisfy ethnic particularities? There is no definite answer. But
one thing is certain — whatever may be the requirements of democracy,
the current phase of reshaping and resizing seem to respond to the
demands of capital as well, and capital and democracy seem to be
coexistingwell. That capital is now the critical factor in the drive for
reorganisation is borne out by the significance of resource in the
scramble for territory and the territorial conflicts.
Let us take the case of water sharing. The instance of resource
sharing shows why governmental rationality can never offer a
sustainable
solution. In the north and the east, the Indus, Ganga and the
Brahmaputra basins have their sources in the glaciers of the Himalayas.
In the central part, the Narmada basin is drained from the Vindhyas
and the basins of the south, the Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery
originate on the eastern slopes of the Western Ghat ranges. The growth
of engineering and agricultural technology in the colonial period led to
construction of dams in India mainly to irrigate drought-affected areas,
situated in the upland areas of the basin. But gradually this meant that
the upper riparian areas became intolerant of water demands of the
lower riparian areas. The British colonial period had witnessed serious
trans-boundary conflicts on the issue of water amongst provinces in
British India on the one hand and between British Indian provinces
and Indian states on the other. Important among these conflicts related
to the basins of the rivers Indus, Cauvery and Periyar.
Even though the Republic of India was to be a federation, the
constitution
devised two different regimes to control water disputes. The
first one enables the centre to regulate or develop the trans-boundary
waters under Entry 56 of the Union List. The second regime
contemplates
allocations of trans-boundary waters amongst the riparian states
by permitting each riparian state, by reference to Entry 17 of the State
List, to develop trans-boundary waters within its territory, subject to a
decision of the high-level constitutional tribunal (Katarki 2003). The
Parliament, in 1956, passed the River Boards Act, under Entry 56 of
the Union List, to regulate or develop the trans-boundary waters by
adopting an approach of integrated management. The Act provided
for an establishment of a river board consisting of representatives of
all riparian states to advise the ‘regulation or development’ of trans-
boundary waters. Whenever dispute or differences would arise between
the riparian states, Section 22 of the Act envisaged settlement of the
same by an arbitrator appointed by the Chief Justice of India. However,
the provision remained dead, as the Union Government never pressed
it into service. ‘Thus, equitable utilisation of trans-boundary waters by
an approach of integrated management is a failed initiative in India’
(ibid.). Now, due to the failed initiative of the central government,
each riparian state has been left free to use the trans-boundary waters
passing through its territory. Reorganisation of States has given rise
to trans-boundary water conflicts. The Union Government, in
exerciseof its powers under the Inter-State Water Disputes Act, 1956,
constituted tribunals for adjudication of disputes in the sharing of
trans-boundary waters of the Krishna, Narmada, Godavari, Ravi
and Beas and Cauvery. On the other hand, the emergence of
environmentalconsciousness in the last two decades has ruled out any
easy governmental solution on the issue of water, and has brought to
the fore the principle of sustainable development as part of the rule of
equitable apportionment in the allocation of allocating trans-boundary
waters in the country.
Today if one were to read the Constitutional Amendment Bill for the
reorganisation of states, one would see three anxieties dominating
the governmental rationality. First were questions of size and the
minute
readjustment of boundaries and exchange of territorial enclaves;
second, the territorial jurisdiction of the High Courts, and the drawing
of electoral constituencies. Resource was not an issue that vexed the
Reorganisation Commission’s mind. Yet as we know today, these
territorial units known as the states with the rich sections of population
in command are pulling their strength together for the coming resource
war in the context of a globalisation-induced capitalist development.
Territory has become a key factor in the coming war of capital.
The question is, if capital produces its specific rationale for
governance, can we imagine an alternative rationality that is dialogic,
therefore less hierarchical and more cooperative, and allows innovation
in the organising principles and structure of organising the territory
— in short a rationale for a dialogic structure which is at the same
time federal and direct? Can we have mechanisms that reflect the
popular urge for immediate democracy, improved levels of civic
competence, and democratic legitimacy of administrative decisions
often passed on to the citizenry as political decision? In other words,
how can we rescue federalism and other dialogic processes from
the politics of integration? I think that is where we have to examine
deeply the limits and imperatives of a national framework of territorial
organisation (one of whose variant is federalisation), find out its limits,
and appreciate the potentialities of federalism to grow once it is ridden
of its national framework, at least in an absolute sense. In short, any
dialogic structure of federalising the ‘national’ space must admit the
possibility of trans-border federalisation of relations (called in vulgar
language ‘sub-regional cooperation’), which indicates trans-national
and inter-cultural connectivity. It is time to tell that the American
(USA) model of federalism was based on exclusions; a post-colonial
design of federalism cannot follow that model owing to hundred and
one reasons and instances, which I have alluded to in the preceding
pages. We must tell that the plain reason for the rejection of either
North American or the Swiss model is that post-colonial federalism
requires a fluid notion of space, time and community instead of
requiring ethically homogenous or cleaned territories.
It is important to explain this point to at least some extent.
Historically,
Indian federalism was never a settled principle of organisation
of the national territory. In the colonial time whereas the colonial
administration was unabashedly centralist, both Congress and the
Muslim League had ambivalent and fluctuating attitude towards
federalism; the praja (tenant) movements in native princedoms had
strong elements of autonomy, democracy and republicanism, which
were initially reflected, albeit in a perverted way, in the grouping of
states; and leaders were candid enough to admit that the Indian system
the Constituent Assembly had given birth to was flexible enough to
serve both centralist and federal needs. The history of organisation of
territory in the last 60 years that I have briefly recounted earlier speaks
of the way the governmental logic has developed in these years. We
have to add to this the developments in the form of the Panchayati Raj
(Local or village self-government) and the provisions of the Fifth and
Sixth Schedules, and Article 371 in particular, and we shall arrive at
a more contentious scenario. States reorganisation has been only a
part of this broader scenario of territorial reorganisation for rule and
governance. Its implications can be grasped only when put along
with other techniques of reorganisation. Yet one has to understand
that these techniques and the broad technology of reorganisation of
territory in a system of hierarchy and differential inclusion in order to
achieve a rational and satisfactory state of rule are not pure expressions
of govern-mentality, as if ‘an unfolding of governmental rationality’,
but are by themselves signals of contested sites, expressions of popular
demands for immediate democracy, participation in political decision-
making, autonomy in public political–social life and flexible ways of
making and unmaking boundaries. Thus the affinity between Tamil
Nadu and sections of population in Sri Lanka, or the peoples on both
sides of the erstwhile Punjab, or Bengal, or Jammu and Kashmir, or
among the population groups living on the borders between Kerala
and Tamil Nadu, or Coochbehar and southern Bhutan is the same
expression of federal instinct as the one which we officially take to be
the principle of states organisation of the country. India’s north-east
shows the need for creative and dialogic federalism in order to enhance
democracy’s capacity to accept claim making as its own inherent
part. It seems clear by now that by the notion of innovative federalism,
we shall have to look for plural ways and structures of federalising.
Thus if in sports or even organisation of border security we can have
alter-native arrangements of units, why can we not have plurality in
other areas of our social and political life? It seems to me in this context
that the debate on legal pluralism has to be deepened.
A paradoxical process, known as hyper-governance,4 marks the
management of the process of organisation of territory in India today,
and offsets to a significant extent the benefits that a rule can draw
from the function of rationally organising the territory. Deployment of
paramilitary and military forces and a ‘securitised’ style of governance
mark the administration of territory. This situation carries the signs
of both colonial model of sovereignty and the post-colonial style of
governance. The combination of these two makes even purely ‘social’
things such as rural health, education, or controlling HIV diseases a
matter of centralised and monitored governance. The national
governanceis thus becoming hyper-governance, and is thus slipping fast
into the model of transnational governance, which follows the logic of
the differentially inclusive and thus of a graded universe of the empire,
eternally requiring exceptional methods of intervention, the essence of
hyper-governance. Thus social governance too has to fit the ways of
hierarchy and a differentially ordered attention of the ruler to the issues
of societies on the margin. In other words, each issue seems to signal
a situation where it appears that the ‘normal’ form of administration
will be unworkable, and we shall need hyperactive and hyper-attentive
forms of supervision, monitoring, management and control. Indeed,
control will come from the techniques of hyper-governance.
Let me now reorganise my argument in this essay as I conclude. I
have tried to argue that states reorganisation in India, which we have
receivedas a story of rational governance, is also a story of conflict-ridden
process of territorial reorganisation of rule. The conflict that marks
the reorganisation of territory as a rational way of rule is but another
name of the continuing war over resources, territory and population.
Therefore we have here the political situation of peace, but one that
hides the social war over territory. Facing death, Foucault declared
that ‘if God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the
last thing that I would like to study would be the problem of war and
the institution of war in what one could call the military dimension
of society’ (Focault 1996). It is this military dimension of society that
leaves its mark on the process of what apparently is non-military, that is
to say the civilian dimension of society — administration, bureaucracy,
decentral-isation of powers, organisation of territory, etc. We shall have
to undertake further research to find out how this task of organising
the territory has carried the mark of a military organisation of territory
and soldiers. Already for counter-insurgency operations we have one
grouping of states, for anti-terrorist operations we have on the horizon
another sort of groupings; in this way we have several groupings
— almost like organising an army — for control of travelling diseases,
illegal immigration, etc. These groupings of states are done no longer
on any cultural basis, such as linguistic, but on the basis of security
and business considerations. Exactly like then having disciplinary
policies for delinquents, rogues, criminals and outcasts, we have in
modern post-colonial India policies for backward, un-civil, wayward
and turbulent states (Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Assam, Chhattisgarh
and Jharkhand as opposed to enlightened and investment-friendly
states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, or
Tamil Nadu). States are being grouped on considerations such as this.
This strategy of grouping, clearly a military strategy, has the power to
effect technical mutations. We can thus witness the appearance of a
certain kind of illegal or wild zone (once again, the political class speaks
of Bihar as being a state of illegalities) to be disciplined by a federal
system that is at the same time a system of incarceration (Lenin spoke
of ‘prison-house of nationalities’). The dark zones are now increasingly
overlapping (almost a unity of illegalities) — zones of diseases,
Muslim-infested, terrorist-stricken, underdeveloped, uneducated, and
populated by vagabonds, also zones marked by thousand and one kinds
of deaths. Reorganisation of territory remains therefore a permanent
agenda of rule, a matter of rational governance.
But since territory appears as the social body of the nation, the
process of cutting the body, piecing it together back, in other words
the reorganisation of the body, rarely becomes entirely peaceful. We
have therefore two ethics opposed to each other marking the process
— the warlike metaphors and the dialogic marks. I have recounted
the warlike metaphors in this way of governing, expressed through
disciplinary techniques of enclosure, partitioning, ranking, serialisa-
tion, spatial control of troops and finally regimentation. It is as if the
government is suggesting through the reorganisation that this is the
correct use of the body; to refer to Michel Foucault once more, this
social body like the individual body has to be ‘docile body’ in order
to be disciplined (Focault 1991).
Can we doubt then that through the continuing process of states
reorganisation in the last 60 years we have witnessed a new process of
organising power relations, whose object is to find the ‘final’, ‘the most
appropriate’ natural body of the society, which will be the bearer of
all specific operations related to territory and population? Can we not
pose the question: Is this natural body of the nation ‘natural’ because
it will meet specific requirements, needs and demands, which, in turn,
will suggest a set of parameters of disciplinary power?
It is in this perspective that I endorse the idea of a dialogic federalism
that permits plural ways of organising the space of a political society; it
contrasts with the disciplinary way in which territorial reorganisation
of India has worked till date.

Notes
1. On the relation of partition as a method induced by governmental
rationality, see Samaddar (2007a).
2. I have discussed this theme in greater details in Samaddar (2007b).
3. For the straight governmental narrative of the historic background of the
formation of states, see http://mha.nic.in/his3.htm (accessed 26 June 2007).
4. On the idea of hyper-governance, see Bhatt (2007: 1073–93).

References
Bhatt, Chetan. 2007. ‘Frontlines and Interstices in the Global War on Terror’,
Development and Change, 38 (6): 1073–93.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish — The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan, pp. 135–69. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1996. ‘ What Our Present Is’, in Michel Foucault and Sylvère
Lotringer (eds), Foucault Live: Interviews 1961–1984 (Interview by André
Berton), trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, pp. 415. New York:
Semiotext(e).
Hasan, Mushirul. ed. 1993. India’s Partition — Process, Strategy and Mobilisation.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Katarki, Mohan V. 2003. ‘Equitable Management and Allocation of Trans-
boundary Waters in India’, SCC (Jour) 29 (2).
Samaddar, Ranabir. 2007a (2005). ‘The Undefined Acts of Partition and
Dialogue’, in Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Rada Ivekovic and
Ranabir Samaddar (eds), Partitions Compared – Reshaping States, Reshaping
Minds, pp. 92–124. Delhi: Foundation Books.
———. 2007b. The Materiality of Politics, vol. 1. Delhi: Anthem Press.
 Part II
Reorganising the Hindi Heartland
 3
‘Making of a Political Community’:
MaThe
Pof
1radheysah Congress Party and the Integration

Sudha Pai

The States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) in 1956 created four

large Hindi-speaking states based on the linguistic principle in the
northern plains namely, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Uttar
Pradesh (UP) and Bihar. Standing in the Gangetic plains none of
them had a distinct regional identity unlike states in the south such as
Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh based on a common history, language
and culture. The latter states constitute some of the ‘perennial nuclear
regions’ of India that have remained through history giving them
a distinct identity (see Spate and Learmouth 1967). They had also
experienced strong language movements, a cultural renaissance and
non-Brahmin movements during the colonial period giving them a
distinct Dravidian identity as well. In contrast, the four Hindi speaking
states in north India, although created on the basis of language, were
administrative artifacts created by the British when they conquered
these areas for purposes of governance. Smaller ‘janapadas’ or cultural
sub-regions remained beneath the overarching administrative and
political structures created by colonial rule. A number of studies
have pointed out that despite a long period of rule by the British and
establishment of rules and institutions of governance, they had not
acquired a common identity by independence.2
Among them MP, a large state standing in the middle of the
subcontinent,
provides perhaps the best example of a state in the Hindi
heartland without a distinct regional identity of its own. Carved out of
the erstwhile Central Provinces (CPs) — an administrative artifact put
together by the British colonial authorities out of a conglomerate of
disparate regions with little in common. It also had a high percentage
of immigrants from neighbouring states who spoke distinct dialects,
 Sudha Pai

a large tribal population and a number of important princely states

such as Gwalior and Bhopal standing outside the colonial structure.
During the 1950s, many apprehensions were voiced about the
manner
in which divergent regions were strung together to create the new
state of MP in 1956. In fact, the task of the SRC in the case of MP
was of ‘reconciling the irreconcilables’. Various claims and
counterclaims
and representations were made before the SRC in 1953–1954:
for the separation of the eight Marathi speaking southern districts and
creation of separate states of Bundelkhand, Madhya Bharat, Vindhya
Pradesh and Chhattisgarh out of the remaining districts and princely
states. Thus, a major problem faced by states such as MP, created out
of disparate regions lacking a common identity that could hold them
together, was that of ‘political integration’.
The late 1950s, when India was attempting reorganisation of its
constituent units, witnessed the formation of a large number of new
states emerging from colonialism that also experienced the problem
of political integration though the context was different. Although
initially scholars stressed upon the social determinants of the
political
process such as cultural orientations, interest-group pressures
and levels of economic development (Apter 1965; Almond and Verba
1963; Geertz 1963; Finkle and Gable 1971; Bendix 1977). Realisation
that ‘dislocations’ arise in the process of nation building led to
emphasis upon the need for ‘political stability, integration and order’
(Huntington 1968). Integration was defined as ‘the amalgamation of
disparate social, economic, religious, ethnic and geographical elements
into a single nation-state’ (Laplombara and Weiner 1966: 413). Many
models of integration that would hold the new states together were
proposed and discussed in the academic literature such as ‘Guided
Democracy’ in Indonesia, ‘Presidentialism’ in Africa and various
forms of ‘Authoritarianism’ in Latin America (Pye 1958; Wallerstein
1961; O’Donnell 1973). More pertinent to our purpose, the single
party system within a democratic structure in Africa and Asia was
identified as the ‘party of integration’ which was expected to manage
conflict, provide legitimacy, generate consensus and encourage
national integration during a crucial period of nation-building
(see LaPalombara and Weiner 1966).
At independence, India did not fit ‘neatly’ into either the
modernisation
or Neo-Marxist frameworks employed to understand the
working of social and political processes in the developing world
(see discussion in Kohli 1987). Here, in contrast, the presence of a
third variable — democracy, gave India the advantage of a democratic
 'Making of a Political Community"

state structure and political processes arising out of a long national

movement and the new constitution that provided stability, democracy
and introduced economic development. The single dominant Congress
system, working within this larger democratic framework, was the
vehicle expected to intervene and penetrate into society and created
political integration at the central level and within the states created
at independence. Thus in India political integration, which was
viewed as establishing unity in diversity among different regions and
cultures in a polity of continental size, was to be achieved through
an ‘accommodative model’ of democratic politics. Based on this
framework, this study proposes that in states such as MP formed by
the unification of disparate cultural and historical regions lacking a
common regional identity such as Andhra, Bengal or Madras, it was
‘democratic political forces’ — particularly the Congress party which
had a dominant presence — that was expected to create an overarching
‘common political community’ that while not erasing the smaller
sub-regional
cultural identities, would hold the state together imparting it
a composite character and identity. Such a model is of relevance for
the other states of the Hindi heartland, particularly UP, which has
experienced the separation of Uttarakhand and is facing demands for
trifurcation of the remaining state.
Academic writings in the immediate post-independence period
were divided over whether this was possible in the case of MP. Mayne
Wilcox writing in the 1960s held:
MP was formed because there seemed to be nothing else to do with
its constituent parts …. the state was not created on the basis of an
indigenous demand and its constituent units in fact possessed almost
no political affinity …. the parts of the state are greater than the sum
(1968: 128, 132).
Each of these organised subordinate entities were ‘semi-independent’;
substantive interests and strongly embedded regional identities formed
an important part of the historical legacies of each region. Therefore,
Wilcox argued, the dominant characteristic of local politics was such
that ‘no coherent political community with well-worn practices and
an intrinsic “spirit of the house”’ had yet emerged. Yet he agreed that
each constituent part had branches of the Congress party that became
the building blocks of statewide party organisation, which being
composite
in character offered little resistance to penetration by exogenous
political trends (ibid.). Subrata Mitra writing much later held that
despite being an artificial amalgam of hitherto separate territories, MP
was also subject to two ‘powerful integrating influences arising out
of the integrative role of competitive politics’: the organisation of the
Congress party, which was the ‘most important common institution
in the state’ and the increasing penetration of the local political arena
by all-India forces binding it together (Mitra 1990: 174).
On the other hand, Morris-Jones and Das Gupta in the mid-1960s
argued that while the distinct units out of which MP was formed give
it a ‘heterogeneous character’, this should not be exaggerated (1968:
178). Most states in India after reorganisation consisted of sub-units
(usually two or three) whose integration remained a major
preoccupation
of the state political leadership. This they pointed out is true not
only of states in which princely states were integrated as in MP, Orissa,
Mysore, Gujarat, Andhra, but also others which have been units for
a long period such as UP and Bihar. The problem of national
integration
faced by central leaders was matched by problems of ‘statewide
integration’ in the states. Further they argued that the extent to which
each of the three divisions of MP — Mahakoshal, Madhya Bharat (MB)
and Vindhya Pradesh (VP) — is a politically uniform and coherent
entity should not be exaggerated. The pattern of Congress support in
Mahakoshal was certainly greater and the range much greater than
in MB and VP. But if other parties’ share of votes were examined, the
same picture of variation within these regions would emerge (ibid.).
Based on this framework, against the backdrop of the lengthy and
difficult process of the formation of the state of MP by the SRC in
1955, an attempt is made to analyse the ‘integrative’ role played by the
Congress party in MP in the post-independence period. It is argued
that the Congress as a strong movement in the colonial period and
a single-dominant party after independence with a presence in every
region of the state had the ‘potential’ to integrate the sub-regions.
In the immediate post-independence period, there were signs of the
Congress emerging as an ‘integrative party’ that could hold the state
together and bind all its sub-regions. However, this process of
political
integration was ‘slow’ and remained at best ‘partial’ as evidenced
from the creation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh in 2000. Regular
demands for a separate state of Chhattisgarh began as early as 1978
by leaders from different parties including important Congressmen
and were not accompanied by strong mass movements at the grass
roots. Demands were also raised for a separate state consisting of the
former Madhya Bharat region, for the formation of a Bundelkhand
state by carving out some areas of UP and MP, etc. Such periodic
demands for the re-division of the state underlines how the artificial
integration of Mahakoshal, MB, VP and Chhattisgarh has not led to
real emotional unity among the political leaders of the three regions.
In short, regionalism still determines the political culture of MP. The
slower integration of the state is also an important reason for the slow
economic growth of the state and the existence of backward regions
within it.3
Two factors have been responsible for the slow and partial
integration
of MP: endemic region-based factionalism and the very early
establishment of a two-party system. While factionalism is a feature of
the Congress party in many states, in MP factions along regional lines
since the colonial period give it a loose and decentralised character,
which the state and central leadership — that constantly intervenes
playing a disruptive role — could not control. There have been periods
when various factional leaders have come together to meet the
challenge
of the opposition within a two-party system — but these have
been few. The lack of a strong challenge ‘from below’ as in UP and
Bihar has allowed factionalism, essentially a struggle between the
upper caste/class leaders of the party for power and patronage, to
continue unabated. Second, the period of single party dominance in
MP was brief and the early development of a two-party system further
divided the sub-regions. While in the immediate post-independence
period factionalism was contained, after the mid-1960s it helped the
rise of the Jan Sangh and the Congress failed to spread from its well
established strongholds. The carving out of distinct regional bases by
both parties within a two-party system further acerbated the regional
character of politics in the state.
Both factionalism and bipartisan politics in the state did not allow
full integration of all the regions and contributed to the formation
of a separate state of Chhattisgarh in 2000. However, it was during
the 1990s that the demand for a separate state assumed momentum.
The collapse of the single party system and emergence of coalitional
governments at the centre created tremendous competition between
the two principal parties, both at the centre and in the states. In MP,
where there are no third parties capable of capturing power, the
Congress and the BJP became two strong contenders seen in the neat
regional division of votes/seats in the 1990s. It was the compulsions
of democratic electoral politics in the highly competitive system
that emerged in the 1990s that was responsible for the formation of
Chhattisgarh, rather than demands from the grass roots. Based on this
analysis, this chapter draws some lessons from the MP experience that
are of relevance to the states in the Hindi heartland.
Processes of State Formation: A Background
The difficulties faced by the Congress party in the post-independence
period in integrating the various regions of MP into a composite state
can be understood if we examine the complex and protracted process
of state formation in the 1950s. Established on 22 December 1953,
the SRC was expected to make recommendations to the Government
of India not later than June 1955, though this was later extended to
September 1955. Its terms of reference were broadly stated: it was
expected to examine ‘objectively and dispassionately’ the question
of the reorganisation of the states of the Indian Union taking into
consideration the historical background, the existing situation and
other relevant factors ‘so that the welfare of the people of each
constituent unit as well as the nation as a whole is promoted’ (SRC
1955: i). However, due to political demands, the Commission gave
importance to two main factors, namely language and size together
with efficiency. In MP, state formation was a two-stage process. The
princely states in the former CPs had to be integrated into the Indian
Union. This exercise was undertaken by the States Department set
up in the central government between 1947 and 1951 under Sardar
Patel.4 Following this, the SRC had the task of carving out the new
state of MP out of the regions constituting the erstwhile CPs and the
former princely states. Both these processes are dealt with in this
chapter and provide a backdrop to the attempt by the Congress party
to integrate the diverse parts of the newly formed state discussed in
the next section.
Integrating the Princely States
The States Department under Sardar Patel and V. P. Menon proceeded
to form unions of the princely states prior to integrating them into
the neighbouring states to form large viable states. The area that
eventually came to constitute the new state of MP in 1956 consisted
of four major regions, three of which were unions of princely states
that were joined to the Hindi-speaking region of the erstwhile CPs.5
A White Paper on the measures taken to bring the 20 states in Central
India, including the major states of Gwalior and Indore, points out that
it was difficult as ‘the United States of Gwalior, Indore and Malwa
constitute the largest of the Unions of States, so far formed’. It justified
this Union by arguing, that ‘linguistically, culturally and historically
and economically they form a complete block’ (ibid.).
Many former rulers resisted the formation of unions and wanted
to retain their sovereignty. The most difficult case was that of Bhopal
where the Nawab demanding a ‘third’ India consisting of the Princely
States, announced the formation of an interim government in April
1947 (Verma 1984: 109). However, once many of the princes decided to
join the Constituent Assembly, he signed the Instrument of Accession
to the Indian Union. More important was the issue whether Bhopal
should join the MB Union or MP or remain a separate state. It led to an
agitation in Bhopal in which the Praja Mandal and the Congress that
were almost identical bodies, split on the issue. However, the people
of Bhopal in large numbers were keen to join either MB or MP, as it
would mean removal of the feudal and autocratic system that had kept
the state economically backward (ibid.: 131). In December 1948 at the
Gwalior session of the MB Congress PCC, a resolution was adopted
for the integration of the Bhopal state with MP. This led to many
leaders of the Bhopal Congress present to pass a resolution against this
stand and to question the right of the MB PCC to interfere in political
matters, that it argued, rested with the central government. Finally the
central government decided in January 1949 to make Bhopal a Chief
Commissioner’s province and a Part ‘C’ state and consequent on the
reorganisation of the states, it was merged with the MB Union and
finally with the new state of MP (ibid.: 162).
In contrast, forming the MB union of 25 states was comparatively
easier despite the traditional hostility between the two large states of
Gwalior and Indore. Initially the idea of two unions — one around
Gwalior and the other around Indore — was mooted, but finally after
many rounds of negotiations it was possible to establish a single one.
This was possible due to the cooperation by the ruler of Gwalior who
in May 1947 was the first ruler of one of the major states in the country
to agree to integration into a union. The Indore ruler on the other
hand tried initially to join the ‘Third Force’ attempted by the Nizam
of Hyderabad and Nawab of Bhopal but ultimately acceded and
cooperated in all matters (Menon 1956: 223–25). Eventually the Union
was inaugurated in Gwalior on 28 May 1948 and became full party
to the constitution in January 1950.
In the case of the 15 Chhattisgarh states there were conflicting claims.
The princely rulers in Orissa and Chhattisgarh initially formed a union
in August 1947 that the central government refused to recognise, but
Bastar, the largest state, had kept out of it. A suggestion considered
was to dissolve the union and form two — of the Orissan states and
the Chhattisgarhi states. But after much consideration it was felt that
the latter was a Hindi speaking area and it was merged with the
Central Provinces in December 1947 (ibid.: 158–59). The governance
of the Chhattisgarhi states was delegated to the government of MP
(ibid.: 172).
VP was formed out of a union of princely states consisting of the
two major states of Baghelkhand and Bundelkhand and 33 smaller
states. Various alternative demands were raised with regard to these
states, the two most important being their merger with either the
United Provinces or the CPs (ibid.: 212). The States Department
argued that the United Provinces was already large and the districts
of Bundelkhand with which they would be merged were themselves
very backward and further additions would only cause poor
administration.
Similarly the CPs had just become enlarged with the addition
of the Chhattisgarh states. The creation of a separate union of states
other than Rewa was also considered and rejected as such a union
would not possess the requisite resources. Thus, the only feasible
proposition
it was felt was to create a union of all the states as they were
backward, had little leadership and politically unstable. The process
of creating the Vindhya Union, which began in April 1948, was a
tortuous one with the central government facing much opposition and
hostility. Due to the two major states refusing to work together, in
April 1949 it was made into a centrally administered area on 1 January
1950. For the interim period, VP was put under the Government of
India, Part C States Act of 1951 (ibid.: 216–18).
The SRC: Reconciling Territorial
Claims and Counter-claims
Once the process of integration of the Princely States was over, the
SRC began its work of deciding on the scope and boundaries of the
proposed state of MP. The Commission decided to invite members of
the public and public associations to put their views before it in writing
by 24 April 1954 (SRC 1955: ii). While MP did not experience strong
movements for reorganisation of the state as in the case of states such
as Andhra Pradesh, Madras or Maharashtra, a number of conflicting
claims and representations were made before the Commission. Most
of these proposals were presented by Congressmen, who were divided
over how the state should be constituted.
 The major demand faced by the Commission was for the separation
of the eight Hindi-speaking districts in the northern part of the CPs
from the southern Marathi-speaking districts to form a large Hindi
speaking central Indian state. The demand had been raised during
the colonial period by political leaders from the Congress party from
both the southern and northern districts. The demand for a separate
southern state of Maha Vidharbha, on the other hand, had been voiced
as early as 1905 soon after the formation of the CPs and was based on
language. The demand for a Hindi-speaking state by political leaders
in the northern districts began in 1938 and was a product largely of
political developments in the colonial period.
The British colonial government decided to unite in 1861 the four
disparate territories of Nagpur, Saugar and Nerbudda in central India
and Berar in 1903 to form the CPs with little regard for their
geographical,social and economic affinities (Baker 1979: 8). Prior to its
unification, the region had been governed by many powers including
the Moghuls and Marathas and its different parts had fallen into
colonial hands at different points of time. The Saugar and Nerbudda
territories were administered by different authorities at different times:
in 1834 they were merged with the newly formed Agra province;
in 1852 they were restored to the North-Western Provinces but after
the revolt of 1857 they were separated and put under a Lieutenant–
Governor as the Central Provinces. The Nagpur area was annexed in
1854 when the ruler died without an heir and after the revolt of 1857,
it was added to the Central Provinces. Administrative and political
necessity led to the unification of these regions into one compact
province. However, many British officers believed that the merger
of the territories was beneficial and in time, feelings of unity would
develop. Colonel Elliot argued in 1861: ‘It is the very heart of India.
It forms the confines as it were of the four Presidencies; from each of
them it is equidistant’ (Khan 1988: 16).
But there were differences from the very beginning, which remained
throughout the colonial period and did not allow for the gradual
formation of a compact province despite the establishment of branches
of the Indian National Congress (INC) in every region. The population
of the province was divided into two linguistic communities: those
in the north spoke Hindi or its dialect Chhattisgarhi, and the other
in the south Marathi and had differences in caste complexion, social
customs and identity (Baker 1979: 2). The population of both regions
was descended largely from those who conquered or entered into the
area from the north and south. Even among them, there were cultural
differences due to the area they came from. In the south after 1743,
the Bhonslas created the state of Nagpur and settled a large Marathi
population making it a predominantly Marathi speaking area. These
developments transformed the society in the plains as the tribals
withdrew into the hills and the language of the invaders — Marathi
— replaced that of the original population (Baker: 11).
While historical and cultural factors were deeply ingrained,
political
developments gave them a more concrete character. The southern
districts, particularly Nagpur, due to their proximity to the Bombay
Presidency quite early came under the influence of the non-Brahmin
and later the Mahar movements and right wing organisations such as
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha.
These movements created an increasing political ferment in the
southern
districts which was lacking in the northern Hindi region. In the
latter region due to their conservative and feudal social milieu,
education,
socioeconomic development and consequently nationalist activity
were slower and no movements based on identity arose. Instead the
northern Hindi districts were from the 1920s drawn into the vortex of
the national movement led by the Congress in the socially
conservative
Hindi heartland region, particularly in Allahabad and Varanasi.
Moreover, the politicians in the Hindi area had no sense of history
as in the case of the south where the name of Shivaji or the Bhonsla kings
evoked memories of being a ruling class and led to nationalist feelings.
In the north, it was not until 1930 that such a sense of nationalism
arose when the shadowy Dakshin Koshal or Mahakoshal idea was
revived to serve as a focus for nationalist aspirations (ibid.).
The divide became stronger following the victory of the Congress
party in the 1937 provincial elections when leaders from both regions
had to form composite ministries and work together. A power struggle
ensued between Dr Khare, a Marathi politician, and leaders from the
Hindi region, mainly D. P. Mishra and Ravi Shankar Shukla, which
set the stage for the ‘final transfer’ of the leadership of the provincial
Congress from Marathi to Hindi political leaders (Baker 1979). The
Hindi leaders won, leading to the Marathi leaders demanding a
separate
state. Consequently two major representations before the SRC were
for the formation of Maha Vidharbha and a Samyukta Maharashtra
state separate from the CPs. The latter movement was strong and led
to the Nagpur Pact of September 1953 among prominent Congressmen
that aimed at uniting under one state the Marathi speaking areas of
the states of Bombay, Hyderabad and Madhya Pradesh (for details, see
Mukerji and Ramaswamy 1955: 15). The SRC quite early conceded
the demand of dividing the CPs as it was not mutually conflicting
and the people of the Hindi speaking areas seemed reconciled to it.
Moreover, in the Marathi speaking areas, the demand had ‘gathered
such momentum that maintenance of the status quo will involve an
increasingly severe strain on the political life and the administrative
machinery of the state’ (SRC 1955: 123). Thus, while language was
the principle on which the new state of MP was formed, political
divisions
among Congressmen were an important contributory factor.
Despite the removal of the Marathi districts, a number of conflicting
demands were made to the SRC regarding the remaining Hindi
speaking
regions of the erstwhile CPs. These ranged from the consolidation
of all of them with the former princely states into one large state,
forming various smaller states, to the maintenance of the status quo on
the other. While demands for retaining various smaller regions were
voiced by local Congress leaders, the Mahakoshal Pradeshik Congress
Committee suggested the formation of a single state consisting of
the Hindi speaking areas of the former CPs together with the former
princely states in the Malwa portion of Madhya Bharat and the whole
of Vindhya Pradesh and Bhopal (ibid.: 126). The demand for a
separate
state of Chhattisgarh was raised in the Nagpur Assembly of the
then state of Madhya Bharat.
As against this suggestion, other numerous claims and
counter-claims
were put forward about the extent of the new proposed state
of MP:

Supporters of Maha Vidharbha wanted the boundaries of

Mahakoshal to be so drawn as to exclude the following areas
—

the Marathi speaking areas of Nimar, Betul, Chhindwara,

Balaghat and Bastar districts;
The northern districts of Madhya Bharat namely Bhind, Morena,
Gird (Gwalior) and Shivpuri, it was argued, cannot be included in
the proposed state of MP as they do not form part of Malwa;
Mandsaur district, which is surrounded by Rajasthan for the most
part, parts of Rajgarh and Guna district were claimed by the
proponents
of the state of Rajasthan. Conversely Sironj sub-division
of Kotah district, which is an enclave in Madhya Bharat, should
be included in the new state of MP.
 The proponents of Vishal Andhra laid claim to the southern
half of Bastar district below the river Indravathi, which is part
of Chhattisgarh; a portion of this district was also claimed by the
Utkal Sammilani demanding a state of Orissa (ibid.: 129-30).
There were also demands for a separate state of Chhattisgarh,
many of which emanated from Congressmen from the region.

After considering various alternatives, the Commission decided in

favour of forming a large Hindi speaking state of MP standing in the
middle of the Indian plateau. It was felt that the former princely states
could not form economically viable states on their own; nor was the
break up of the better-developed core Mahakoshal region desirable.
Further, the addition of the fertile Chhattisgarh agricultural plain would
help create a viable state. The removal of the northern districts was not
considered feasible on economic and administrative grounds. The law
and order situation in the Chambal and the construction of the Matatila
dam on the Betwa, which was meant to serve the entire northern part
of MP, made it necessary to amalgamate it with the rest of the state.
Therefore the proposal for a separate state of Bundelkhand including
parts of UP and MP was not practicable. Regarding transfer of districts
to Rajasthan, it was felt that these areas had long been administered as
part of the CPs and as public opinion had not expressed itself in favour
of change, the Commission was in favour of keeping Malwa within
the new state. The Commission also felt that the linguistic claims to
Bastar by both Andhra and Orissa were unfounded and though the
area is bilingual, it is local indigenous languages such as Gondi and
Halbi along with Hindi, which are spoken in the region (ibid.).
Thus the Hindi speaking portion of the CPs and the previously
amalgamated Hindi speaking states of Chhattisgarh formed the core
around which the new state of MP was established. MP was
classified
as Part ‘A’ state bracketing it with other major states of India.
Formed in November 1956, the new state came to have:
14 districts of residuary MP that were the Hindi speaking region
of the former CPs.
The whole of Bhopal.
The whole of Vindhya Pradesh.
The whole of Madhya Bharat except the Sunel enclave of
Mandsaur district.
The Sironj sub-division of Kotah district of Rajasthan.
 Thus creating the state of MP was a difficult task and full political,
economic and emotional integration of the population would take a
long time. The bulk of the proposed state was made up of ex-princely
states, with autocratic rulers separated from the national movement
and the mainstream of the socio-political life of the country; it was only
in some of the larger states such as Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal that
praja mandals had been formed. In the new state, out of 43 districts
about 32 were composed either wholly or partially of princely states.
The Commission, while recommending the formation of the state,
held that the ‘essential unity’ of the central Indian region was based on
the common usage of Hindi and its administrative organisation was
justified on the basis of economic size and efficiency (SRC 1955: 126).
Some commentators have held that the Hindi speaking region had a
long history of democratic institutions functioning, its revenues were
high and the traditions of administration were firmly established so
much so that its officers included some of the outstanding
administrators
of India (Verma 1984: 129). But the new state was created
almost solely on the basis of language out of various territories that were
at unequal stages of social, economic and political growth (Chandidas
1967: 1503). As a commentator pointed out:
MP was born in error: it was a sprawling, incoherent and inefficient
administrative unit sought to be made coherent by the magic touch of
language …. The truth is that the SRC was unable to face squarely
the administrative complexity of far-flung territories in very different
degrees of administrative control. The Commission was wholly
preoccupiedwith political pressures, and MP was carved out of Central
India, Madhya Bharat and Orissa to produce a surface cohesion, both
historically, politically, without substance.6

Equally important, most of the proposals for the division of the state
had been presented by Congressmen, which shows that the party,
despite a strong presence in the province, was divided over how
the various regions of the former CPs and princely states were to
be reorganised. This divisive legacy contributed to factionalism and
impacted on the ability of the Congress as a dominant party to integrate
the state in the post-independence period. It is against this background
that we move towards an examination of the integrative role of the
Congress party in MP and the extent to which this succeeded in the
post-independence period.
The Congress Party and the Politics
of Integration in MP
As the party of integration, the Congress at independence had two
closely related challenges.7 The first was to bring regional elites within
the party together and establish a united organisation by controlling
factionalism. Second, to be able to do this, the party from its core area
of Mahakoshal — in which it had established itself as a strong political
force by the end of the colonial period — had to penetrate and bring
the rest of the province under its control. Neither of these were easy
tasks. Political leaders had to undertake ‘brokering’ of competitive
demands for regional development by competing groups and interests
without alienating any group. The role played by the Congress party
is examined by analysing two interrelated developments: electoral
politics in order to trace the ‘geographical spread’ of the Congress
party in the different regions of the state; and the attempts by the
party leadership through ‘balancing and brokering’ (Wilcox 1968). To
manage factionalism and integrate all the various regional units of the
Congress party into a strong single dominant party.
An important reason for the persistence of factionalism in MP has
been its feudal and conservative society and absence of movements
‘from below’ by disadvantaged sections such as dalits and tribals that
have questioned the position of the upper castes in recent years as in
UP and Bihar. Also, due to the lack of a large middle caste across the
state such as Jats or Yadavs, there has been little pressure to
accommodate
the middle or lower castes or form ‘downward alliances’ as
in Bihar. Consequently, factional struggles have been mainly between
the Brahmins and Banias or more recently the Rajputs for positions
and patronage. The few dalit, tribal or Other Backward Castes (OBC)
leaders who are found within the party are due to cooptation rather
than upward mobility in the party.
Initially in the early 1950s, the Congress party was able to control
factionalism and establish itself electorally as a dominant party over
some important regions. This was because the new state had just been
formed and factions had not yet been able to regroup themselves. It
was also due to the leadership of Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla who
had the stature to hold the party together and who ‘thought of the
state as a whole’ (Purohit 1975: 224). In fact, there was no movement
for a separate Chhattisgarh state in the 1950s because he was from
that region and was keen to unite the state. Heading one of the most
powerful factions in the former CPs, he had built up a strong base in
Raipur where he had been active in the national movement as an
important
leader of the Hindi Congress (Ali 1970). He played a role in the
formation of the state and was selected as its first Chief Minister once
the Marathi speaking districts were removed. Moreover, the Congress
was able to absorb a number of small regional parties — many small
parties disappeared after reorganisation, and opposition parties were
not yet well organised. The 1950s therefore were a phase of ‘structural
consolidation’ when the Congress was able to establish itself as a single
dominant party in the state. It performed well in the both the 1952
and 1957 state elections gaining more than half the seats and almost
50 per cent of the votes cast. The year 1957 was the ‘high watermark
of the Congress in MP’ which it could not reach in the elections that
followed (Purohit 1975: 205).
During this phase, the Congress was able to perform well in
Mahakoshal obtaining over 80 per cent of the seats in the first two
assemblyelections and was able to penetrate into a number of regions.
In Mahakoshal, the party remained unchallenged in subsequent
elections
due to a strong organisation and trained cadres even during
periods of weakness when it performed badly elsewhere in the state.
Despite the rise of the Jan Sangh as a strong opposition party from
the mid-1960s, it was not able to make inroads into this region and
retained its dominance here even after the rise of a two-party system.
Similarly in the Vindhya region, neither parties of the Left nor the Right
were able to establish themselves despite strong agrarian mobilisation
by them in the late colonial period. The Socialists and the Left parties
were too small, unorganised and did not form alliances leading to
division of votes which helped the Congress; by 1967, most of these
parties had disappeared. Despite the region having a large number of
upper castes, as right wing forces had not penetrated here in the colonial
period, the Jan Sangh also failed to put down roots in the region and
disappeared from the region by the mid-1960s.
It was the MB and Bhopal regions that posed the strongest challenge
to the inroads of the Congress party, as it did not have a base here in
the colonial period. It performed well initially in the 1952 and 1957
elections as the Jan Sangh and other parties were still weak and not
well organised and it was the strongest region after Mahakoshal. But
by 1967, the Jan Sangh had made inroads into the region and due to
the Gwalior ruling family supporting it the Congress could not establish
itself here. However, in Bhopal, the Congress performed better and
was able to retain a base. Thus between 1952 and 1962, the Congress
was able to maintain its dominance in Mahakoshal, gain control over
Bhopal and the Vindhya region and gain a foothold in MB where it
shared space with the Jan Sangh. This helped the Congress state
leadership control factionalism as viable coalitions within the state
after independence depended upon the cooperation of Mahakoshal
(Jabalpur or Chhattisgarh) and MB, and rivalry between these two
regionsshaped success in elections in the state for the Congress party.
Post-1956: Politics of Factionalism
It was the death of Ravi Shankar Shukla in late 1956 that plunged the
party into a crisis. There was an increase in factionalism and the
rise of the ‘locals’ in each region dividing the party (Wilcox 1968). By
the late 1950s, four major groups were in conflict with each other. The
first were the four factions led by Congress leaders of the regions that
had been brought together to create MP — the Taktmal Jain and the
Kanhaiyalal Khadiwala group in Indore, the Shankar Dayal Sharma
group in Bhopal, a group led by Shambu Nath Shukla and Captain
Awadesh Singh in VP; groups led by Ravi Shankar Shukla and Seth
Govind Das in Mahakoshal and numerous groups in Chhattisgarh
— an important factor there being the Brahmin–Bania conflict. There
was no strong group in Gwalior — a region that had been outside the
influence of Congress in the colonial period (ibid.: 156). The second
group consisted of the business community composed of indigenous
and ‘outsider’ groups, namely Gujarati and Marwari capitalists, who
had links with party factions. The third group was the central Congress
leadership that constantly intervened imposing chief ministers on the
state, ostensibly to control factionalism but also to maintain its hold
on state politics. Finally, outside the party were the former princes,
tribal leaders and other ‘petty kings’ who were important. Especially
at times when the Congress was in crisis due to a narrow majority in
the legislature (ibid.: 148).
Due to the eruption of factional rivalries, the central Congress
leadership intervened and appointed an ‘outsider’ Dr K. N. Katju,
a Kashmiri Brahmin, who though born in MP usually resided in
Allahabad, as Chief Minister (CM) on 31 January 1957 (Purohit 1975:
202). In fact, almost every successive CM after Shukla has been a
nominee of the central leadership and identified with a particular region
— K. N. Katju with Allahabad, D. P. Mishra with Mahakoshal, S. C.
Shukla with Chhattisgarh, P. C. Sethi with MB and Arjun Singh with
VP, etc. — and most had links with the former princely rulers. Because
of the need for regional support, each CM had to resort to arithmetic
of regional politics and of winning followers from other regions to be
able to keep his own position. Factional rivalries were most marked
just prior to an election on issues such as distribution of tickets leading
to a ‘marked relationship between the degree of homogeneity in the
party and the election results’ (Chandidas 1967: 1509).
Katju as an ‘outsider’ was expected to be above regional
parochialism
and hold together a party that was at best a ‘coalition of interests’
(Wilcox 1968: 148). However, the decision was unpopular and its
impact was reflected in the 1962 election when the party fell short of a
majority, winning only 142 out of 288 seats. Even the CM was defeated
in the election by an insignificant Jan Sangh leader. The Jan Sangh
gained in the MB region, in Vindhya Pradesh the Congress gained less
seats and in Mahakoshal the party gained less than 60 per cent of the
winning candidates (ibid.: 147). An in-house enquiry indicated that
the poor performance and Katju’s defeat was due to ‘internal sabotage’
by factions unhappy with the imposition by the central leadership of
an outsider as CM (Purohit 1975: 203; Chandidas 1967: 1507). The
Inquiry
Commission investigated charges that the Deshlehra group had
sabotaged the electoral efforts of the candidates from the governmental
wing (Wilcox 1968: 153). It was only by bringing independents and
dissident members back into the party that a Congress government
could be formed with 153 members that gave it a bare majority. But it
was a weak government that could not take significant policy decisions,
build up a strong party organisation or control factionalism.
Due to the electoral debacle in 1962 arising out of internal
factionalism,
the central leadership intervened and made use of the Kamaraj
Plan to change the leadership in both the governmental and the
organisational wings of the party. Despite the fact that Mandloi had
been elected the leader of the assembly and made the CM after the 1962
elections, the central leadership replaced him with D. P. Mishra as CM
on 2 October 1963, against the wishes of his supporters. Although once
expelled from the party for fighting an election on a Praja Socialist
Party (PSP) ticket, a nominee of Indira Gandhi, Mishra was reinstated
as he was seen as the ‘Iron Man’ of the party. Dissidents, unhappy at
the imposition of an outsider, even put forward a principle of rotation
under which Chief Ministers would in turn be appointed from the
two principal regions: since the first had been from Mahakoshal, the
next should be from MB. However, the central leadership felt it had
to intervene as factionalism was weakening the party.
 Mishra was able to reunite the regional sub-systems and bring most
of the Congress organisation under his control. It was felt that his
tenure marked the beginning of political and administrative stability8
in MP reflected in the victory of the Congress party in the 1967
elections. He brought in about 30 MLAs from the PSP into the party,
which strengthened his position in the legislature. But his position also
stemmed from the backing of the Brahmin lobby, the disappearance
of the Khadiwala faction from state politics due to his indictment in
a case by the Indore High Court, the Kamaraj Plan and the backing
of the central government. Despite his strong image, Mishra had to
appoint ministers from all regions in the state in proportion to their
strength in the party in 1964: eight from Mahakoshal, five from MB,
four from VP and one from Bhopal. Regional considerations also
underlay all public policy decisions taken by the cabinet.
However, Mishra brought a style of functioning often described as
‘dictatorial, intolerant and vindictive’ that was new to MP.9 As CM,
he attempted to create a strong, united and homogenous Congress
party as well as strengthen his own position, which increased factional
rivalry at the local level. As a commentator observed:
‘In these three years the Chief Minister (D. P. Mishra) has built an
invincible position for himself within the Congress. He has also tried,
not unsuccessfully, to break the back of at least the Socialist parties ….
To strengthen his own position, he has systematically captured the
Congress organisation by steadily and uncompromisingly eliminating
rivals from both the government and the party; the reason he gave being
that good administration — which he has undoubtedly given — needs
homogeneity (Sharma quoted in Chandidas 1967: 1514).

Such a style of functioning could not succeed in a party made up of

many groups among whom bargaining and negotiation was the norm.
Prior to the 1967 assembly elections, Mishra refused to give tickets
to many dissidents. Unhappy at their supporters being denied tickets
in the 1967 assembly elections, a number of leaders of the Jain and
Deshlera group resigned in November 1966 and formed the rival Jan
Congress group. The regional pattern was quite clear: assisted by some
leaders from the Chhattisgarh region, it was leaders from MB who
raised the banner of revolt against the dictatorial methods of Mishra.
The Jan Congress entered into a pre-election alliance with the Jan
Sangh, SSP and the Maharani of Gwalior — who unhappy at Mishra
not providing her a say in ticket distribution in the assembly polls in
the Gwalior region — decided not to contest on a Congress ticket to
the Lok Sabha and set up her own candidates against the Congress
in the former MB region comprising 10 districts. All attempts at
reconciliation between her and Mishra by Congress leaders failed and
the Congress could not gain a single seat from the Gwalior region in
1967. However, while the Rajamata factor was important, the defeat
was also due to the failure of the Congress to build up a base in this
region (Chandidas 1967: 1509). An indication of the discipline that
Mishra was able to impose on the party is that despite the defections,
the Congress won a majority gaining 56.4 per cent of the seats (Ahmed
and Singh 1976: 169).
The Jan Congress continued its collaboration with opposition
parties
after the election and brought down the government of Mishra
formed after the election on 28 July 1967, which lasted only 143 days.
The defectors left the Congress led by Govind Narain Singh because
Mishra did not include a single person who had defected from the
party, as he believed that his role was to maintain probity in public
life. Govind Narain Singh and other defectors formed the government
with the Jan Sangh and the Congress had to sit in the opposition from
August 1967 to March 1969 (Purohit 1975: 208).
Unlike in many other states, in the 1967 assembly elections the
Congress party gained 167 seats and was able to gain a majority
improving its performance over the 1962 elections. Mishra was able to
see that there was no sabotage in the election by dissidents as in 1962
(Chandidas 1967: 1503). The Jan Sangh gained 78 seats and 28.3 per
cent of the vote. However, the emerging structure of bipartisanship
in the state is clearly seen in the 1967 elections. The Jan Sangh had
managed to improve its position from a mere six seats in 1952 to 78 in
1967, and vote share from 3.6 per cent in 1952 to over 28 per cent. In
fact, the two parties between them were able to gain 40.7 per cent and
28.3 per cent, i.e., almost 70 per cent of the total votes cast. Apart
from independents, no other party was able to get more than 5 per
cent of the votes. Moreover, in terms of seat percentage, which is a
better measure than the number of seats — the Congress and the Jan
Sangh in 1967 between them gained 56.42 per cent and 26.01 per cent
respectively, i.e., 80 per cent of the total seats.
Factionalism within a Two-party Competitive System
Consequently, the relationship between the Congress and the Jan
Sangh from 1967 onwards was not that of the one-party dominance
model which posits a ‘party of consensus’ and ‘parties of pressure’ in
which one characteristic which prevents the latter from becoming an
alternative to the former is that they gain in strength when the
dominant
party loses and vice versa (Ahmed and Singh 1976: 172). The Jan
Sangh, unlike the other parties, was able to develop a fairly substantial
firm support base, markedly autonomous of the changes in the support
for the Congress (ibid.). In 1967, the regional divide between the
Congress and the Jan Sangh within an emerging two-party system also
becomes quite clear. The success of the Congress was primarily due to
the support it received from its traditional stronghold of Mahakoshal
from where it gained 111 seats, which was 72.08 per cent of the total
seats. Next was the Vindhya region where it gained 30 seats, but which
constituted 75 per cent of the seats in the region.
A study shows that the Congress did well in the Mahakoshal and
Chhattisgarh divisions of Bilaspur, Raipur and Jabalpur and from
the Vindhya region of Rewa. In Bilaspur, the Congress could gain as
much as 50.28 per cent of the votes while in Jabalpur it gained 46.05
per cent and in Raipur 38.89 per cent. In Rewa, it could obtain over
46 per cent. On the other hand, the Congress performed poorly in
the divisions of Bhopal, Gwalior and Indore, getting as low as 18.95
per cent in Gwalior (Purohit 1975: 205). In these regions, the Jan
Sangh performed well. In MB and Bhopal, it gained 54 seats, which
constituted 52.94 per cent of the total seats in the region; in contrast,
in Vindhya region, it got only one seat and hardly 2.50 per cent of the
seats. Purohit points out that out of 36 seats in the Bhopal division,
Congress could secure only 12 while the Jan Sangh gained 21 seats;
out of 31 seats in the Gwalior division the Congress could not secure
a single seat while the Jan Sangh and its allies could gain 30 seats;
in Indore out of 54 seats the Congress could gain 23 seats while the
Jan Sangh got 25 seats. In terms of vote share also, the share of the
Congress fell to only 18.96 per cent in Gwalior though it was much
better in Bhopal and Indore with 36.48 per cent and 42.39 per cent,
respectively (ibid.: 206).
An important reason for the two major parties dividing the regions
between them is the absence of an agrarian-based party in MP such
as the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) in UP. The BKD in the mid-1960s
changed an evolving two-party system in UP into a three-cornered fight
by undercutting the Jan Sangh in a number of regions. The Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP) has remained too small a party in MP to play such
a role and forms a third force between the two major parties snatching
votes from both of them. Following the establishment of a pattern of
two-party competition after 1967 continuing into the 1970s and 1980s,
both the Congress and the Jan Sangh came to have a secure electoral
base within a statewide structure of partisanship (Mitra 1990: 187).
Large swings back and forth between the two parties became the norm;
each party when it won could make inroads into the stronghold of the
other while retaining its own area of strength. In 1967, the Congress
formed the government but was defeated by the opposition, which
formed the Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) coalition in which the Jan
Sangh played an important role.
Factionalism continued in the post-1967 period which witnessed the
rise of a new generation of regional leaders in the state. Shyama Charan
Shukla from Raipur in Chhattisgarh, the elder son of Ravi Shankar
Shukla, was made the leader of the Congress opposition party in the
legislature defeating Mishra on 26 November 1967. Eventually, despite
the existence of many other senior leaders in the legislature he became
the CM on 26 March 1969 when the SVD coalition fell because the MP
High Court declared Mishra’s 1963 election to the state assembly void
and he was debarred on grounds of corrupt practices from contesting
elections to the legislature for six years (Purohit 1975: 212). The
Mahakoshal–Chhattisgarh faction had again succeeded in capturing
the office. There was also support for Shukla as he was not an outsider
but a leader within the state.10
On assuming power, Shukla attempted to revamp and rejuvenate the
state administration and put it on a sound financial and administrative
basis. It was felt that with a younger generation in power, factionalism
would end and the party would be united. The brief period in which
the Congress party had to sit in the opposition had also curbed
factionalism.However, Shukla had the disadvantage that he had little
support at the centre in comparison with Mishra who remained
powerful at the central level of the party due to the support of Indira
Gandhi. Consequently when the Congress party did not perform as
well as the other states in the 1971 general elections gaining 21 out
of 37 seats with the Jan Sangh gaining 11 seats, Mishra’s supporters
at the state level connived to remove him. They complained that the
poor performance was a result of infighting and lack of interest by the
CM. Shukla also did not take up some of the programmes suggested by
Mrs Gandhi to state governments or remove ministers who were seen
as corrupt (Ali 1970: 220). His defiance of the PM and the impression
that he was supporting the Syndicate when the Congress split led to
his removal (Purohit 1975: 217).
The central leadership again decided to bring in P. C. Sethi an
‘outsider’. This was done so that with the Mishra group, he would be
able to ensure that the Congress (R), supporting Indira Gandhi
performedwell in the state assembly elections of March 1972 — the first
state assembly election after the split. Hailing from Rajasthan, Sethi
was a supporter of Mrs Gandhi during the Congress split at the centre
and was Minister of State for Petroleum and Chemicals in the central
Congress ministry (Ali 1970: 220). Sethi was initially not keen as he
felt that his own party was against him, but as the central leadership
supported him he decided to take up the post.11 Mrs Gandhi hoped
that he would implement her socialist policies, which Shukla had
failed to do. Sethi enacted a Ceiling Law, house sites to the poor were
distributed, Rural Debt Amortisation Law was enacted, revision of
minimum wages took place, legislation abolishing bonded labour was
passed, etc.12 A second reason for his appointment was his roots in
the MB region of Ujjain where he had been active in the MB Pradesh
Congress Committee (PCC). This was where the Congress was badly
defeated and it was hoped that Sethi would be able to rehabilitate the
party and meet the challenge posed by the Jan Sangh. However by
the time Sethi was sworn in, ticket distribution for the 1972 state
assembly elections had already been decided by the central
committee
of which D. P. Mishra was a member. The factional lines were
clear; few of those who had been ministers in Shukla’s government
received tickets, and Shukla himself was given one in the last stages
of the process.
However, the Congress (R) performed well in the 1972 assembly
election getting as many as 220 seats out of 294 while the Congress
(O) was wiped out in the state. It gained 220 seats and 47.9 per cent
of the votes while the Jan Sangh seat share fell to 16.2 per cent. But
even without the benefit of an opposition alliance (as in 1967) and
despite a pro-Congress swing, the Jan Sangh could sustain its share
of the vote at 28 per cent (Ahmed and Singh, 1976: 169–70). It got 27
seats in MB: 19 in Gwalior and eight in Indore. The Congress increased
its strength in the Mahakoshal, MB and Bhopal areas though its seats
fell in the Vindhya region. The Congress performed better in MB
securing 62 seats against 23 in 1967; in Gwalior it gained 10 seats out
of 31 and in Indore 52 out of 62. In Bhopal division, it gained seven out
of 11 seats (Purohit 1975: 219). However, in VP, it could gain only 26
seats compared to 30 earlier.
Despite the victory of the Congress party in the 1972 elections,
factionalism continued to plague the Sethi government and Congress
leaders used every opportunity to criticise and oppose the running of
the administration. Although Mrs Gandhi attempted to keep it down
by threatening the dissolution of the assembly, yet signature campaigns
took place for and against the CM. In the 1970s, endemic factionalism
strengthened the hands of the Jan Sangh. In bye-elections between 1972
and 1975, Congress lost six seats particularly the important Jabalpur
and Govindpura seats, which increased the strength of the rightist
forces in the state. However, the real problem was that Sethi had no
base in his own in the party as he had been brought in by the high
command. Most of the members of the legislature were supporters of
Mishra or the Shukla brothers. Sethi tried to run his administration
independently and despite being an efficient person, could not succeed.
Finally in December 1975, Sethi was made minister in the central
government and S. C. Shukla was again sworn in as the new CM in
January 1976. Although the Congress had been in power for most of
the post-independence period, by 1978 the state had been governed
by 11 CMs for a period of 22 years (ibid.).
In the 1977 assembly elections in MP, the Congress also performed
badly gaining only 84 seats but it could still secure 35.9 per cent of the
vote. The Janata Party (JP) won 230 seats and 47.3 per cent of the vote
and formed the government. However, the JP experiment was short-
lived and in the 1980 assembly elections in MP the Congress came
back to power with a huge majority though the Jan Sangh retained
30 per cent of the votes. This was repeated in 1985 though the Jan
Sangh retained 32 per cent of the votes. The central government
decided
to bring in Arjun Singh, a strong leader from the Vindhya region
of the state. Like Mishra, he was again a nominee of Indira Gandhi
who felt that a strong leader was required to control factionalism.
He was opposed by other contenders within the state such as Shukla
and Kamal Nath and their followers. However, with the support of
the central leadership he was sworn in as CM on 9 June 1980 with
B. S. Solanki as Deputy Chief Minister on the demand of party
leaders within the state. 13 Mishra was not made CM as he had quit
the Congress in 1977. While many believed that it was because he was
ignored by the central Congress leadership including Mrs Gandhi,
other commentators have pointed out that it was because the Bhave
Commission investigating into the gulabi channa14 relief money scandal
in MP had passed strictures against him as CM for not removing the
corrupt ministers in his cabinet (Singh 1977: 1729–30). This led to
the retirement of Mishra and left Arjun Singh without a leader who
could challenge him.
Arjun Singh was from an important jagirdari family from VP and
was a late entrant into the Congress in 1960. Prior to that, he was
elected to the MP assembly as an independent. From 1962 onwards,
he had been member of the cabinet of Mishra and later Sethi. In 1980,
it is alleged that he joined hands with the Gwalior exprince Madhav
Rao Scindia and other feudal elements and was able to become
the CM keeping out both V. C. Shukla, the younger son of Ravi
Shankar Shukla, and Sethi. A feature of Arjun Singh’s tenure was
that he undertook major reshuffle of his cabinet many times during
his tenure and changed his ministers, thereby keeping a number of
legislators happy and control-ling factionalism. He also attempted to
give due representation to all the regions in the state which helped
him complete his term of five years (Ali 1970: 465). In 1983, over a
dozen Congress MLAs were appointed chairman and vice-chairman
of various public undertakings and other state-level bodies such as
the Energy Development Corporation, Rural Housing Corporation
and Warehousing Corporation with the rank of cabinet minister or
minister of state (ibid.: 471).
Following the 1985 assembly elections, in which the Congress
performed very well, the new PM Rajiv Gandhi intervened to make
a number of changes in MP to curb the endemic factionalism in the
state. Constant change of Chief Ministers by the central leadership is
seen during the decade giving little chance for local Congressmen to
choose their own leaders. Motilal Vora, an ‘outsider’, was appointed
the CM and a young supporter Digvijay Singh was appointed the head
of the MPCC. Vora was earlier a supporter of Arjun Singh but on his
appointment did not include supporters of the latter in the cabinet and
attempted to create his own following. Though from Rajasthan, Vora
had been elected to the MP assembly for the first time from Durg in
1972 and had held the seat consistently since then. 15 He did not belong
to any of the factions in the state and had a reputation as a capable
and honest person. However, his tenure was marked by constant
efforts by the Arjun Singh faction to remove him. 16 Using his pro-poor
stand and the policies he had implemented for this section during his
tenure, Arjun Singh constantly criticised the Vora administration
for not looking after the interests of the poorer sections and thereby
undermining the support base of the Congress among them. Issues
such as removal of slums and jhuggis (shanties) and policies for the
Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) were used to
undermine the position of the CM which led to heightened factionalism
in the party even leading to en masse resignation of Members of
Legislative Assembly (MLAs) loyal to Mishra. 17
These events led the central leadership to remove Vora and Arjun
Singh was sworn in as the Chief Minister in February 1988. 18 The
main reason was the im-pending state assembly elections in 1990 in
which the Congress would have to face the new Hindu party, the BJP.
It was felt that Arjun Singh with his pro-poor image was better fitted
to lead the Congress against a party associated with the upper caste
Hindus. The new cabinet was hence seen as an ‘election cabinet’ but
in reality, it was packed with Arjun Singh’s supporters. But due to the
Churhat Lottery scandal in which Arjun Singh and his close relatives
were associated, he had to resign and the central leadership brought
back Vora as the Chief Minister on 28 January 1989, just prior to the
assembly elections.19
Factionalism and constant change of CMs during the 1980s, which
led to constant disruption in policy making, was an important factor
in the defeat of the party in the 1990 assembly election. By the early
1990s, the Congress was again divided into a number of groups.
Factions
headed by Arjun Singh, the two Shukla brothers, Motilal Vora
and Madhav Rao Scindia created divisions in the party, which was
responsible for the loss of a number of seats in MP. These groups were
joined by two younger leaders, Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh, who
were keen to play a seminal role in the state. The various factions joined
hands using a platform of development to defeat the BJP in 1993, but
factionalism continued unabated once the party captured power. The
two terms in office by Digvijay Singh were marked by attempts by
the Arjun Singh and other factions, who had opposed his selection,
to remove him from office.

Political Competition in the 1990s:

Division of MP
By the 1990s, it was clear that the Congress party had not been able
to integrate the various regions out of which the state of MP was
formed. In fact, demands for the division of the state had begun fairly
early from all political parties, including the Congress, not only for a
separate state of Chhattisgarh but also MB and Bundelkhand. While
a separate state of Chhattisgarh was formed in 2000, the question of
formation of Bundelkhand by merging it with contiguous areas in
Uttar Pradesh still remains open, pointing to further possible divisions
within the state.
The area described as Chhattisgarh does have certain features
distinguishing
it from the rest of the state of MP. It is one of the historical-
cultural regions of central India and is described as the ‘rice bowl of
central India’. Large part of it is forested and it also has a substantial
tribal population mainly in Bastar and Surguja districts. The region,
which is rich in forests and minerals, experienced a number of
movements. But these have been mainly by the tribals against
exploitation by out-siders in the colonial period and by organisations
such as the Kisan Adivasi Sangthan, Bandhua Mukti Morcha,
Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh and Satpura Kisan Evam Mazdoor
Kalyan Samiti, after independence (Roy 2002). Organised mass
movements
for the formation of a separate state have not taken place. Such
demands have emanated from some of the elite sections and political
leaders. In the 1950s, Congress leader Khubchand Baghel started the
Chhattisgarh Mahasabha and later the Chhattisgarh Bhratir
(brotherhood
society) Sangh with Pyarelal Singh, a freedom fighter. In
the late 1960s, Pawan Diwan, a poet and later Congress MP from
Mahasamund, started the Chhattisgarh Rajya Nirman Manch. More
seriously in mid-1978, a group of political leaders signed a written
document demanding a separate state of Chhattisgarh and formed
a separate Chhattisgarh State Formation Committee (Kumar 1998:
131). It included Vidya Bhusan, a Janata MLA; Purushottam Kaushik,
erstwhile Socialist leader and Union Minister for Tourism and Civil
Aviation who de-feated V. C. Shukla in the 1977 elections on a
platform of statehood for Chhattisgarh; and S. C. Shukla and Pawan
Diwan who had defeated the latter in the assembly election (EPW 1978:
680). They argued that the vastness of the state of MP had resulted in
the growth of regional disparities and with an area of 1.55 lakh sq km
and a population of 1.15 crore (11.5 million), Chhattisgarh could be
a state bigger than Punjab, Haryana or Kerala.
During the 1980s, the demand for a separate state of Chhattisgarh
became closely entangled with Congress factionalism, which gave
it a fillip despite the lack of movements on the ground. As CM,
Arjun Singh used the idea of a distinct Chhattisgarhi identity to build
both his own base and keep the Shukla brothers out of power. In
the absence of any grass roots movements, he encouraged regional
Congress OBC leaders, particularly Kurmis such as Purushottam
Kaushik and Chandulal Chandrakar who periodically demanded the
creation of a separate state, to undermine the position of the Brahmin
Shuklas. But at the same time, Arjun Singh attempted through various
policies for disadvantaged sections to gain the support of the tribals and
dalits (Mitra 1990; Gupta 2005). Some of his policies such as removing
the middlemen in the tendu leaf business helped local tribals and were
aimed against the BJP.20 Most importantly, by showing some support
for the Chhattisgarh Rajya Nirman Manch (CRNM) or Chhattisgarh
State Creation Campaign, formed in the 1980s to lead the campaign
for a separate state, in order to undermine the position of his rivals,
Singh gave the demand some standing.21
However, despite these political developments the demand for a
separate state remained confined to the elites and mainly the urban
areas of Durg, Raipur and Bilaspur and did not spread into the rural
areas or smaller towns. Within the population of the region, the only
section interested in the formation of a separate state was the elite ex-
Malgujas (communities of rich peasants, who earlier had the jagirdari
rights to collect land revenue on behalf of the Maratha and British
rulers) keen to become numerically powerful under a new state. The ex-
Malgujas mainly comprise Brahmins and Kurmis, and many Congress
leaders, such as Rajya Sabha member Dr Khubchand Baghel who
demanded the new state, were Kurmis. The tribals, landless labourers
and poor peasants have not been organised or shown much interest in
the formation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh. In fact, certain groups
preferred in the late 1990s to join a separate tribal state of Jharkhand if
formed than Chhattisgarh, and the Naxalites wanted a separate state
of Dandakaranya around Bastar (Kumar 1998: 131). There was also
considerable sub-regional disparity within the Chhattisgarh region in
matters of growth of industries and irrigation facilities which could
prevent any such movement from moving forward. A study in the
late 1990s classified the demand for a separate state of Chhattisgarh
together with Bodoland, Gorkhaland, Vidharbha and Bundelkhand
as ‘low key demands’ which persisted over time but with little or
no mass support and which it was argued had little hope of success
(ibid.: 130).
 Chhattisgarh is described as a tribal state when it was created and
as much as 32 per cent of its population belongs to this category. But
neither did the tribals demand its formation nor have a voice; it is
the rich cultivating peasantry, the upper castes and OBCs settled in
the plains and the business community that occupies a predominant
position in the governance of the state. Some scholars argue that the
formation of these states was possible due to the emergence of this
regional elite (Majeed 2003: 97).
More immediately, in the 1990s the issue of separation of
Chhattisgarh became enmeshed in strong electoral compulsions
arising out of the highly competitive two-party system that arose
following the collapse of single party dominance and emergence of
unstable coalitional governments at the centre. In MP, there was
intense competition between the Congress and the BJP to gain power
as the two national parties faced each other. With no strong regional/
state-level parties that could capture power, there was heightening
of competition seen in the neat division of support in MP in their
regional strongholds between them. The BJP managed to capture
power in 1990 gaining 219 seats out of 320. But in 1993, all the various
Congress factions in a rare show of unity joined hands and using the
plank of development, as against the Hindutva agenda of the former,
were successful in defeating it.22 The Congress and the BJP alternated
in power firmly establishing the two-party system around these two
parties in the state. These were the immediate political developments
responsible for the division of MP rather than any genuine desire on
the part of either the Congress or the BJP to fulfill the aspirations of
the local people.
The competitive politics of the 1990s contributed to the revival
of the CRNM under the leadership of Chandulal Chandrakar and
after his death, Ajit Jogi, later the first CM of Chhattisgarh. Several
successful region-wide bandhs and rallies were organised under its
banner supported by major political parties including the Congress.
These activities led local leaders of the BJP, which earlier did not have
a base in the region, to compete with the Congress in demanding a
separate state, which they hoped would give them the support of the
OBCs in the Chhattisgarh plains and the tribals in the Bastar area
(Choudhary 1998). Although both parties had promised statehood
for Chhattisgarh in their election manifestoes since 1993, the BJP did
not take interest in the issue when it was in power in the state between
1989 and 1992, as it had not emerged as a significant electoral issue
(Venkatesan 2000). The demolition of the Babri Masjid that led to
the dismissal of the BJP government in 1992 was far more important
at this point.
The BJP began to espouse the cause of statehood in the mid-1990s
only after it lost all the 11 seats from the region in the 1991 Lok Sabha
elections. By making the electoral promise to carve out a separate
state, the party won six seats in the region in the 1996 elections. It
was during the 1998 Lok Sabha elections that the issue of separation
of Chhattisgarh became part of the electoral struggle between the
Congress and the BJP to gain power at the centre. During the campaign,
Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee promised statehood for Chhattisgarh
if the voters elected BJP candidates to all the 11 seats. This pledge
paid handsome dividends; BJP candidates were elected from seven
constituencies. The BJP-led government at the centre introduced a Bill
in the Lok Sabha in 1998, but it lapsed after the government fell. In the
1999 elections, Vajpayee repeated the promise and held the Congress
responsible for bringing down the government before the Bill could be
passed in Parliament. This led to the BJP obtaining eight seats in the
region. Electoral compulsions also influenced the Congress party in
the 1990s. The party had officially not recognised the various demands
for Chhattisgarh prior to 1993 even though it was in power both in the
state and at the centre over several terms. The Congress government
headed by Digvijay Singh on assuming office in 1993 realising that the
issue was gaining importance and could help the Congress strike roots
in the region, passed the resolution for statehood in the Assembly in
1993 and again in 1998 when the President referred the Bill to elicit
its views. It passed the resolution again when the President once again
referred the Bill to it, after the centre introduced a fresh Bill to replace
the 1998 Bill.
Despite the two main parties taking up the issue, apart from political
rallies there were few signs of a movement on the ground. 23 It was the
Congress-led Chhattisgarh Rajya Sangarsh Morcha (CRSM) started
in May 1999 by V. C. Shukla that led a strong agitation after the
NationalDemocratic Alliance (NDA) government failed to introduce the
Bill in the Budget Session of Parliament in 2000. The CRSM became
active as it became clear that both the BJP and the Congress were
interestedin the creation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh. It was able
to gain some support in the region by merging with the Chhattisgarh
Asmita Sangathan Samiti (CAS), an independent group of
intellectuals
who met frequently in Raipur to exchange ideas on the concept
and contours of the new state. Started in January 1994 by Mannulal
Yadu, it was formed as a non-political organisation after earlier
attemptsto maintain the Chhattisgarh State All-party Manch failed. In
1999 with the issue gaining political importance, its members felt the
need to expand the organisation under influential local leadership so
that it could make an impact. Yadu approached V. C. Shukla, who
unhappy on being denied a ticket by the Congress party to contest the
Lok Sabha elections of 1998 and hoping to take advantage of the fact
that he belonged to the region, agreed to merge the CRSM with the
CAS (Venkatesan 2000).
Although the CRSM had members from other parties, it had none
from the BJP as Yadu held that ‘the former is essentially a secular
movement’. The movement created divisions within the Congress,
as Shukla’s political rivals in the Chhattisgarh were unhappy that it
would help him emerge as a leader within the region. Pawan Diwan, a
former Congress Member of Parliament from Mahasamund, accused
him of hijacking the movement from him. The Congress party did not
openly oppose the CRSM, and this helped Shukla mobilise Congress
supporters, says Vijay Guru, a former State Minister hailing from
this region. Shukla used the picture of Sonia Gandhi in the CRSM’s
banners, although he had not obtained prior permission from the
Congress to launch the movement.
The CRSM organised a rally on 30 May 2000 at Jagdalpur in Bastar
district and on 26 June, its members courted arrest in the Chhattisgarh
region. When it became almost certain that the centre would introduce
the Bill in the monsoon session, the CRSM sponsored a 24-hour bandh
in Chhattisgarh on 20 July, followed by an impressive rally at Jantar
Mantar in New Delhi, to coincide with the start of the Parliament
session.
Leaders of the CRSM alleged that the BJP wanted to delay the
Bill until the Assembly elections of November 2003, in order to reap
electoral dividends. Leaders of the BJP on the other hand accused the
Congress of blocking the introduction of the Bill in the Budget Session
by raising technical objections that the draft Bill was not circulated to
the members in advance. Congress leaders feared that the BJP would
take credit for the passage of the Bill even though Congress support
was essential for its adoption in both Houses of Parliament. With the
passage of the Madhya Pradesh Reorganisation Bill in the Lok Sabha
on 31 July 2000, the new state of Chhattisgarh was carved out of MP
with Ajit Jogi the first CM between 2000 and 2003.
 Congress factionalism even after the formation of a separate state
between the Ajit Jogi and V. C. Shukla factions contributed to the
loss of the region in the 2003 state assembly elections. The latter,
angry at being ignored by the central leadership, joined the
Nationalist
Congress Party (NCP) just before the elections to ensure that the
former did not become the Chief Minister. As a result, the NCP got
only one seat in Chhattisgarh, but 8.95 per cent of the vote which
affected Congress fortunes (Sharma and Sharma 2003). Detailed
constituency-wise
results show that the NCP ensured the BJP’s victory
in nearly 20 seats, securing 4 to 21 per cent of the votes polled. The
combined Congress-NCP vote in these seats was way ahead of the
BJP, that contrary to all expectations gained 50 seats against 36 for
the Congress.24 In a straight contest, the Congress could have defeated
the BJP and retained Chhattisgarh after its formation if it had been
able to unite the party during the elections. More than the BJP, it was
the factionalism between the Shukla and Jogi factions that contributed
to the defeat of the party in the state.
Conclusion
States Reorganisation was an important component of the project of
nation building in the immediate post-independence period. It involved
both bringing the princely states into independent India and redrawing
the map of the subcontinent to reflect the desires of the people of the
various regions. The principle used by the SRC, based on promises
made during the national movement, was that of unity in diversity
based on language, regional identity and large size to enable centralised
planning and ensure effective use of national resources. This had
different repercussions in different parts of the country. In southern
India, it created states such as Madras, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh
based on language and regional identities that had evolved over time
and which were expected to hold the state together. However, in the
Hindi heartland it created large states such as UP, MP, Rajasthan and
Bihar that historically had no regional identity, consisted of a number
of geographical and cultural sub-regions including princely states, and
were carved out of administrative artifacts created by the British for
colonial governance.
The basic problem at independence in the states of the Hindi
heartland
was creating political integration among the various sub-regions
that were at different levels of economic, political and social
development.
Among them MP, standing in the middle of the subcontinent
with a number of cultural zones, a largely immigrant population, a
number of tribal groups and many princely states provides a good
example. The princely states, except in few cases such as Gwalior and
Bhopal, had experienced autocratic systems of governance and were
economically backward. The nationalist movement had not
penetrated
into these states until the late colonial period when praja man-
dals were established. The remaining regions, although governed by
the British from the latter half of the 1800s and having experienced
mobilisation by the INC, continued to maintain their distinctive
subregional
cultural characteristics. Moreover, political developments
in the colonial period such as organisation and mobilisation along
sub-regional units by the INC contributed to the continuation of these
divisions into the post-colonial period.
While integration was a problem faced by many new states emerging
out of colonialism, in contrast to the new states of Asia and Africa,
in India it was to be carried out not through authoritarian/military
means but through a democratic process. With the establishment of a
democratic system on the foundations of a long nationalist movement,
it was hoped that in the states of the Hindi heartland lacking a regional
identity, through the functioning of institutions such as legislatures,
the electoral system, political parties and common governance over a
period of time, coherent states with an overarching composite
identity
holding the sub-systems together would evolve. Rapid economic
development through five-year plans, it was felt, would provide support
to the new federal structure. In states such as MP, which had not
experienced regional/identity movements and thrown up parties such
as the Dravidra Munetra Khazagam (DMK) in Madras state. It was
the single dominant Congress party system as a broad-based umbrella
organisation that could mobilise various sections of the people and
hold the regions together, that was expected to function as the ‘party
of integration’. In MP, the Congress had branches in all regions of
the state and it was hoped that these would provide the foundation
on which this process of integration would proceed.
Analysis of the post-independence period shows that due to tall
leaders in the Congress party such as Sardar Patel, the integration of
the princely states and reorganisation of the states was successfully
carried out throughout the country despite problems. There was no
balkanisation of the subcontinent as feared by some scholars. In MP
during the process of state formation, many different propositions were
raised before the SRC over the manner in which the various regions
were to be integrated. While the state was formed on the basis of
language, patterns of mobilisation in different regions and differences
among regional Congress leaders in the colonial period also played
a role, leaving a divisive legacy. However, the Congress party in the
immediate post-independence period was able to gain the support of a
cross section of the population, establish itself in a number of regions
and emerge as a party of dominance. Opposition parties were initially
weak and formed after independence. But this early phase proved to be
brief due to endemic region-based factionalism coupled with the early
establishment of a competitive two-party system with the rise of the
Jan Sangh and later the BJP. Thus, whatever integration of the state
took place, it was eventually under a system of two-party competition,
not under a single dominant party system.
By the late 1970s, demands for division of the state along
subregional
lines began to be voiced, as the process of integration could not
move towards fruition. Internal factionalism weakened the Congress
organisation and did not allow the establishment of a strong and
coherentparty. The lack of an inclusive party in which the lower castes/
classes could participate as equal members meant that factionalism
was a struggle among upper caste/class regional leaders for power
and patronage. In the absence of strong leadership that could hold
the party together, Congress factions based in regions competed for
the Chief Ministership and important posts in the government and the
party. Organisational interests of the party remained neglected at the
cost of ministerial ambitions. As a consequence, group and regional
considerations very early gained the upper hand over the interests of
the state as a whole. In the 1990s, intense electoral competition between
the Congress and the BJP to capture the different regions, that in turn
acerbated factionalism in the former, further intensified divisions
leading to the formation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh.
Some lessons can be drawn from the MP experience that are of
relevance to the states in the Hindi heartland. The Congress party
could not function as a party of integration creating an overarching
composite state identity. Endemic factionalism within the Congress
party played both a positive as well as a negative role. It allowed a
number of different groups to co-exist within the party allowing it
to be a broad-based umbrella organisation representing a number of
groups and regions. However, it also created a loose, decentralised and
region-based organisation that lacked strength and coherence. With
the early establishment of a bipartisan structure, attention became
focused on competitive populism rather than statewide development,
a feature that intensified in the 1990s with the emergence of
unstable
coalition governments at the centre. These developments
impactedon political and economic governance seen in the continuation
of backward regions within the state. It is these factors that led to the
formation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh despite the absence of any
strong grassroots movements. The movements in the late 1990s for a
separate state were led by political leaders, primarily Congressmen,
fuelled by internal competition to establish a support base in the region
and keep out opponents. These primarily political movements did not
focus on the backwardness of the Chhattisgarh region nor was this a
significant demand for the formation of a separate state. As our study
shows, even after the formation of the state, the Congress lost the 2003
elections more due to internal factional quarrels rather than the BJP,
which traditionally did not have a strong base in the region.
In sum, the MP experience suggests that division of large states in
the Hindi heartland such as MP, UP or Bihar into smaller states, as
suggested by its advocates, will not necessarily translate into better
governance or faster economic development. Some scholars, pointing
to the experience of small states such as Haryana or Himachal Pradesh
have argued that such a division will be of advantage in the case of the
large BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar
Pradesh) in the Hindi heartland as well. Smaller states, it is held, will
bring government closer to the people and enable improve
administration.
However, our study indicates that this is not possible if the same
structures of political competition and governance as in the larger states
are continued in the new states. The mere breaking up of a state to
create smaller ones alone will not bring about a basic transformation
in governance or development as the example of Jharkhand testifies.
Moreover, it is important to realise that the demand for a separate
state of Chhattisgarh has been in existence in MP for a long time. It
is only after the intensely competitive politics of the 1990s between
the Congress and the BJP and factionalism within the former that
this demand was granted. Instead, the new states created must build
inclusive political structures that will bring all regions and groups
including the dalits and tribals, towards working for regional, social
and economic development. This is possible only when these states are
able to move beyond divisive politics to a more genuine democratic
politics that encompasses all sections. The reshaping of the states of
the Hindi heartland, including MP, lie in this direction.
Notes
1. The title ‘Making of a Political Community’ is borrowed from Wilcox
(1968).
2. For UP, see Kudaisya (2006); for Rajasthan, see Sisson (1972); for MP,
see Wilcox (1968); for Bihar, see Brass (1974).
3. This aspect has not been dealt with in this chapter. See Shah (2005).
4. The role of the States Department and of Sardar Patel is dealt with in
Menon (1956).
5. For a detailed day-to-day description of the process whereby the various
regions were amalgamated into MP, see ibid.
6. ‘Congress Defeat is Nearly Certain in MP’, Tenth of the Series ‘1967
General Election’, The Times of India, 26 December 1966, New Delhi.
7. This section, except where otherwise stated, draws upon Pai (2010).
8. Link, p. 28, 5 July 1964, New Delhi, quoted in ibid.: 155.
9. The Times of India, 3 August 1964, quoted in Wilcox (1968: 156).
10. ‘Mr Shukla’s Return’, The Times of India, 25 December 1975.
11. ‘P. C. Sethi says Threat to Leadership’, Statesman, 29 October 1974,
New Delhi.
12. National Herald, 28 June 1976, New Delhi.
13. The Times of India, 14 June 1980, New Delhi.
14. Channaor chickpea is a major pulse grown in large parts of MP, especially
in Indore, Bhopal and Vidisha. It is easily affected by the amount of
moisture in the soil. In the late 1970s, the crop was spoilt due to untimely
rain leading to it becoming gulabi or pink in colour. The state government
provided relief to farmers but the funds were siphoned off by middlemen
leading to a scandal which was investigated by the Bhave Commission.
This scandal contributed to the removal of Mishra as chief minister and
appointment of Arjun Singh in his place by Mrs Gandhi.
15. Deccan Herald, 12 June 2007, Bangalore.
16. News Time, 5 May 1985.
17. ‘Another People’s Leader’, The Statesman, 27 May 1987, New Delhi.
18. The Times of India, 15 February 1988, New Delhi.
19. The Times of India, 28 January 1989, New Delhi.
20. ‘TenduPolicy, Key Issue in Chhattisgarh’, The Hindu, 10 November 1993,
Chennai.
21. Discussion with Satyadev Katare and other Congress MLAs at Bhopal,
August 2007.
22. The BJP performed well in its traditional stronghold of Malwa and Bhopal,
particularly in the areas of the former princely states where the RSS had
developed roots very early, and which the Congress has not been able to
enter into. In 1993, the BJP retained more than three-fifth of the 50 seats
it had been able to win in 1990 that left it with a majority of seats in
 the region. In Bhopal it won nine seats out of 12, as against 11 in 1990.
In contrast, the Congress performed well in the Mahakoshal area. In
1990 here, the BJP had won 61 out of 76 seats but in 1993 its tally was
reduced to 23, similar to its performance in 1985 when it was able to win
only 15 seats. Nor did the BJP do well in Gwalior and Vindhya Pradesh
in 1993: in the former, it had won three-fourth of the seats in 1990 but
could retain only half of them in 1993; in the latter, its strength fell by
half. In Chhattisgarh, the BJP had managed to make inroads into this
region in the 1985 state assembly elections; it gained five seats in 1990
but in 1993 it won 34 seats.
23. There was little support from other parties. The Communist Party of India
(Marxist) stated that there was no basis for the creation of a new state.
The party’s State secretary Shailendra Shaily argued that in the 1950s,
new states were created on the basis of language, which was rational.
The demand for Chhattisgarh ‘stems from political reasons rather than
from any genuine popular movement. The language spoken here is
Chhattisgarhi and the script used is Devnagari. So, Hindi will continue
to be the official language of the new State,’ he pointed out.
24. For instance, in Dondi Lohara, the BJP got 40.64 and the Congress 31.18 per
cent of the votes. What made the difference was the NCP’s 21.74 per cent
share. Likewise, at Mahasamund, the BJP won by a little over 1 per cent
margin in a three-way contest that saw the NCP cornering 15.48 per
cent of the votes. Pronounced in individual constituencies, this trend
found equal expression at the state level; the BJP’s 35.02 per cent vote was
only a fraction more than the Congress’ 34.98. See Sharma and Sharma
(2003). See also, Katyal (2004).

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 4
Reorganising the Hindi Heartland
in 2000: The Deep Regional Politics
of State Formation

Louise Tillin

In November 2000, three new states came into being in India:

Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand. Several features stand
out about this most recent reorganisation of borders within India’s
federal system. In the first place, it involved the division of three large
states— Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh— in the so-called
Hindi heartland of north-central India. This was the first time
since independence that a central government had agreed to a largely
non-linguistic rationale for granting statehood. Second, given that the
prominence and influence of these states in national political life had
often been explained in part by the large number of parliamentary
seats they wielded, we might not have expected to see chief ministers
agreeing easily to their bifurcation. The rhetorical resistance of Bihar’s
Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, who exclaimed ‘Jharkhand mere
lash par banega!’ (‘Jharkhand over my dead body!’), was more in keeping
with expectations. Yet from the early 1980s, leaders of Uttar Pradesh
and Madhya Pradesh had begun to toy with political strategies that
had the effect of promoting the idea of dividing their states. 1 Not
only were they pursuing politics that might have had the effect of
diminishing their future political power, they were acquiescing in
a potential reduction of the revenue base of the state in the future.
Third, one might expect some degree of counter-mobilisation— such
as has been evident in the case of Telangana in 2009–2010— from
groups who expected to lose out as a result of border change. But by
the time that the new states were created, there was no significant
opposition to statehood within the regions that became states and
the resistance that had existed in some parent states had been largely
overcome.
 m Louise Tillin

This chapter has a limited ambition: to explain why a variety of

actors at the subnational level in north India began to think that it was
to their advantage to politicise the question of state borders. It will ask
why such a significant degree of consensus emerged around the idea of
creating new states given that, for the reasons listed above, the issue had
the potential to be contentious. I will suggest that the reorganisation
of the Hindi heartland reflected the gradual shifting of the tectonic
plates of federal political geography in response to distinct and evolving
logics of politics at different levels of the federal system since the late
1960s. Three levels can be singled out as important: the national, state
and sub-state (regions of individual states). In this chapter, I will focus
on the two subnational levels (state and sub-state). I largely leave aside
the national level of analysis, not because it is insignificant but because
I seek to highlight the deep regional roots of state creation.2 Article 3
of the Constitution, which sets out the right of Parliament at the centre
to create new states or change boundaries on the basis of a simple
parliamentary majority, appears to set Indian federalism apart from
other federal systems which give greater protection to states’ rights in
these matters. But one of the most significant aspects of the central
government approach to the question of states reorganisation over
time has been its disavowal of an interventionist role in setting a clear
agenda for the revision of internal federal borders. The central
government
has, over time, left space for consensus-building at the regional
level. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government
moved ahead with plans to create certain states between 1998–2000,
it did so where there was already a large degree of consensus at the
state- and sub-state level in favour of bifurcation. This was partly— but
not only— as a result of decisions by local BJP politicians to support
longer standing demands for statehood.
The three new states are all richly endowed with natural resources
—minerals, forests and water— and have been home to prominent
social movements, including Chipko, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha
and the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha which were all formed in the early
1970s. These three movements, in different ways, problematised the
pattern and consequences for local populations of resource extraction
and conditions in the extractive industries which had developed in
their respective regions. These currents of protest intersected with
identity-based movements— among tribal communities in Jharkhand
(and to a lesser extent also among tribals and Scheduled Castes in
Chhattisgarh) and hill-dwellers in Uttarakhand, some of which also
 Reorganising the Hindi Heartlandm

demanded statehood. This has led to the suggestion that the granting
of statehood should be seen as an institutional recognition of the
demands of these movements and of the historical injustice meted out to
certain communities as a side-effect of patterns of economic
development.
I will argue here that we should approach such readings with
a degree of caution. Not only did state creation take place at some
distance
from periods of heightened mass mobilisation and in the absence
of such mobilisation in Chhattisgarh, it only occurred once broad based
pro-statehood coalitions had formed in electoral politics: these became
more than simply coalitions of the disadvantaged.
Table 4.1:
Table Scheduled Tribe
4.1: Scheduled Tribe and
and Scheduled
Scheduled Caste Population of
Caste Population of the New States
the New States
State Scheduled Castes (2001) Scheduled Tribes (2001)

Chhattisgarh 11.6% 31.8%

Jharkhand 11.8% 26.3%
Uttarakhand 17.9% 3%
Source'. Government of India (2001).

This chapter is divided into three parts. It begins by considering

existing explanations for state creation in the Hindi heartland. The
second section looks at the role of chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh
and Uttar Pradesh in helping to create a situation where borders
became part of the currency of politics. The third section focuses on
the reasons for a convergence of opinion around the idea of statehood
within the regions of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand that
were to become states.
At the state level, a gradual realignment of politics had been
taking place in north India from the late 1960s. The most important
structural change arose from what Christophe Jaffrelot has called the
‘silent revolution’ that swept north Indian politics in this period as a
result of the rise to political power of lower castes (2003: 55) and, in
places, the emergence of locally dominant landowning castes who
had benefited from land reforms and the Green Revolution. These
changes took place alongside— and compounded— the decline of
Congress Party dominance across north India. In this chapter, I argue
that the regionally differentiated nature of the gradual assertion of
political independence by the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and
groups of farmers especially, served to slowly change the logic of the
existing boundaries of north India. As Zoya Hasan notes of Uttar
Pradesh, it was upper-caste dominance of politics that had provided
the ‘framework of political bonding in a fragmented society’ in that
state (1998: 19). Similar could be said of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.
As distinct political arenas were consolidated within each state as a
result of the politicisation of middle and lower castes in different ways
and time periods in individual regions of large states, some state-wide
leaders began to endorse and pursue politics that brought the borders
of their existing states— hitherto tacitly legitimised by patterns of
social dominance— into question.
At the sub-state or peripheral level, political leaders were more
embedded in the local political economy of these resource-rich
regions
than state-wide leaders. A critical part of the story here is the
interaction between politicians and actors in the various social and
statehood movements that grew up in these regions. In each of the
regions, the development of a local BJP leadership who— often
with the encouragement of national leaders— began to support
demands for statehood was centrally important. In Jharkhand and
Uttarakhand, it was partly the competition between social movements
and political parties, against the backdrop of the politics of caste-based
empowerment that was transforming the politics of the rest of
Bihar and UP, that led popular movements and political parties to
converge around a shared goal of statehood. Support for statehood was
particularly attractive for the BJP because it offered a potential means
of demobilising some extra-parliamentary protest and attempting to
channel this into electoral politics, while also allowing them to compete
with pro-statehood parties. In Chhattisgarh, where there was no mass
mobilisation in favour of statehood, the impetus for border change
came largely from within the political elite and partly reflected the
social mobility and politicisation of some lower caste communities
within Chhattisgarh, as well as competition between Congress and
the BJP.

Existing Explanations
There have been only a handful of attempts to explain the creation
of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand. Most of these studies
have argued that we should see state creation in the light of changes
to the relationship between the central government and states in the
1990s, but differ as to whether they analyse state creation as a product
of an evolving system of ethnic conflict management or as a result of
changes in the party system.
 One set of explanations frame states reorganisation as an
institutional
response to social and ethnic diversity. Maya Chadda sees the
creation of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand as being made
possible by a new self-confidence among national elites about the
resilience
of Indian federalism and the country’s territorial unity, especially
following the resolution of conflicts in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir
(2002: 53). ‘Despite serious limitations and glaring flaws,’ she writes
of India after 2000, ‘India’s federalism had finally forged a nation state
from a vast array of diverse and divided ethnic entities’ (ibid.). As
conflicts between the central government and the states began to ebb
and regional parties found greater prominence in national political life,
the creation of new states became a less challenging prospect for the
central government to contemplate: it did not lead to soul-searching
about the threat of national disintegration. Other authors suggest that
the creation of the new states improved the representation of tribal or
culturally distinct groups or that the bestowing of statehood was the
culmination of struggles of social movements among marginalised
populations in these regions (see, for example, Oommen 2004: 140;
Guha 2007: 621). As I argue elsewhere, such shorthand explanations
for the creation of new states can be misleading because they do not
open up the political process by which the states came into being
(Tillin 2011). Social movements made an important contribution to
political life in these regions, but the prelude to state creation involved
the emergence of tacit consensus around border change among groups
with diverse interests and ethnic identities.
Another set of arguments focus more on the regionalisation of
India’s party system since 1989, with the coming to power of caste-based
parties in north India and the advent of national coalition
government. David Stuligross has argued that national parties such as
the BJP became increasingly likely to support statehood demands as
they became ‘simultaneously more dependent on voters in neglected
sub-regions (because state-level parties appeal to voters in the “other”
part of their states with greater success) and less capable of promising
substantive developmental benefits in exchange for votes’ (2001: 18).
For Stuligross, it was both the decentralisation of budgetary control to
state governments from the centre, as well as the increasing success of
state-level parties, that explain the changing attitude of national
parties
towards regional movements. By supporting the creation of new
states, national parties could seek to improve their influence in parts of
states that were being governed by a new type of regional political party.
A complementary argument is made by Emma Mawdsley who suggests
that support for regional movements was particularly attractive to the
BJP in light of the ‘clear potential political pay-offs (in terms of MPs
and state governments)’ that would result from the creation of states
(2002: 48). Even though the number of seats involved was relatively
small (5 in Uttarakhand, 11 in Chhattisgarh and 14 in Jharkhand), she
suggests that in the new era of unstable coalition government at the
centre, a few seats either way could help determine who governs in a
state, and even at the centre. Thus the advent of national coalition
governmentgave national party leaders greater incentives to respond to
regional demands.
My argument has a good deal in common with those that highlight
the evolving party system in north India. It is important to note,
however, that the national parties which were being sidelined into
neglected sub-regions by the rise of new caste-based parties in north
India were not parties which ever commanded electoral majorities
across entire states in north India before they began to support
statehood demands. Instead, they were national parties— such as
the Socialist Party in Chhattisgarh, the Jan Sangh and later BJP
in Jharkhand and Uttarakhand— which fostered sub-state political
bases to increase their leverage against Congress initially. Offering
support for statehood was one way that non-Congress parties could
demonstrate their regional roots. The rise of national parties in these
sub-state regions happened at the same time as the emergence of
state-level parties elsewhere. The emergence of new national political
formations (the Janata Party and BJP) and state-level parties was tied
up with the dismantling of the era of one-party Congress dominance
across the country. This is the backdrop against which consensus
about the desirability of changing state borders gradually developed
among a variety of different actors at the state and sub-state levels in
north India.
The roots of the slow evolving consensus around statehood were
deep and lead me to add an important extra layer of historical
complexity
to arguments about why the BJP might have favoured the
creation of these new states in 2000. It may be the case that the BJP’s
central leadership banked on increasing their electoral presence in the
regions which later became states, or on increasing the power of the
centre by dividing large, politically influential states. But the party’s
regional leaders were involved in a more complex game, entangled
with longer term structural changes in north Indian politics. Changes
in the nature of government formation in New Delhi and the instability
of coalition governments in the 1990s are, as Mawdsley emphasises,
important in understanding the immediate decision-making context
of national party leaders. They help to explain why national parties
might be more sympathetic to the creation of more states in 1998–2000
when legislation to carry out this reorganisation of states was tabled
in the national parliament. But it was the achievement of political
consensus at the regional level that was important in ensuring that
certain statehood demands were acted upon by the BJP-led national
government in the late 1990s (and why others such as Telangana
and Vidarbha outside the Hindi heartland were not). This chapter
therefore highlights the longer term process of political negotiation
and contestation at the regional level.
Unlikely Parents: State Leaders and
Demands for Statehood
In this section, I set out how in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh,
two different types of chief minister— one a lower caste leader of
a regional party and the other an upper caste Congress politician
—began to bring the borders of their state into question. I suggest that
they did this as part of a bid to consolidate a shift in the social base
of electoral politics and undermine the hold on power of upper caste
politicians, especially their rivals, in the region for which statehood
was being proposed. These processes took place in two large states of
the Hindi belt in which upper caste dominance of politics had lasted
significantly longer than in the linguistic states of south and west
India (Jaffrelot 2003: 7). In the absence of strong countervailing
statewide
identities or founding myths, I propose that it became relatively
uncontentious for chief ministers to toy with borders.
As Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph have argued, the 1980 election
was a watershed moment for the Congress. Even though the party
returned to power at the national level, they could not simply revert to
pre-1977 modes of politics and hope to survive (Rudolph and Rudolph
1981). Though the Congress continued to win national electoral
majorities, it faced an increasing array of regional opposition. Political
participation among OBCs had increased markedly by the early 1970s
and new political parties sought to mobilise voters along caste lines,
consolidating different types of electoral coalition. The survival of
state-level politicians depended on their adaptation to the new political
climate of deepening social participation in politics. One part of a
strategy of adaptation to the emerging political landscape by both
Congress and non-Congress leaders was to encourage a new ‘politics
of borders’. Caste demography and the intensity of lower caste political
mobilisation varied across regions within states. A more assertive class
of owner-cultivator farmers emerged in some regions of north Indian
states, but nowhere were they to be found in all regions of a state. In
this context, some state-level leaders seized on statehood demands
as one means of coming to terms with the decentralised political
landscape within their states. This chapter takes only a snapshot view
of this process, focusing on two periods in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar
Pradesh when the actions of a state leader helped to bring the borders
of their state into question.
Arjun Singh (Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh from 1980–1985,
and 1988–1989) an upper caste Thakur, came to power in Madhya
Pradesh as Congress took over from the Janata Party government
of 1977–1980. On becoming the chief minister, he faced two major
challenges. First, if the Congress Party were to survive in the region
he needed to adapt to the new political landscape that had come to
fruition in the three years of Janata rule. The party had to build new
social alliances and Arjun Singh was the first Congress chief minister in
Madhya Pradesh to explicitly seek to include lower castes in the ruling
coalition. This was a state that had long been dominated by a very
narrow range of societal interests drawn from a handful of prosperous
families, many of which were the former rulers of princely states. 3
The second major challenge for Arjun Singh was to keep his factional
competitors at bay, especially the Shukla brothers (Vidyacharan or
VC and Shyamacharan or SC), in Chhattisgarh. I suggest that the
promotion of a regional Chhattisgarhi identity helped him address both
these challenges: (a) by attempting to build alliances with lower castes
and classes in Chhattisgarh, and seeking to maintain their allegiance
to Congress, and (b) by isolating the Shukla brothers on their home
turf by encouraging a focus on their ‘non-Chhattisgarhi origins’.
Arjun Singh saw the potential to reach out to the large population
of politically available OBCs across Madhya Pradesh. In the absence
of widespread mobilisation from below (for example, through farmers
movements as seen in other states in this period), he pursued a largely
top-down approach. He began by implementing some (limited)
affirmative action policies and inducting more OBCs into politics.4
In doing so, he was ahead of many other north Indian leaders (Gupta
2005). But where there had been some mobilisation of farmers in the
state— by the Socialist Party in Chhattisgarh, for example— he
attemptedto align with this social stratum, with the added incentive of
seeking to marginalise his major opponents in the party. In Chhattisgarh
—the ‘rice bowl’— there was some fertile agricultural land (although
this should not be overstated— it was largely dependent on rain-fed ir igation)5
— and some OBC landowning, cultivating castes who exerted
a degree of social and economic dominance. It was these castes,
particularly
Kurmis, who had been involved in kisan (farmer) and socialist
politics in Chhattisgarh, including land rights campaigns, and had
periodically demanded the creation of a separate state of Chhattisgarh.
While the Jan Sangh had been the dominant player in the Janata
government in the rest of Madhya Pradesh, the Socialists had developed
a pocket of strength in Chhattisgarh. The Kurmi leader Khubchand
Baghel had set up the Chhattisgarh Mahasabha in 1956, after leaving
Congress to join the Socialist Party. Purushottam Kaushik, another
Kurmi Socialist politician, had defeated the region’s prominent
Congress leader V. C. Shukla in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections on a
platform of statehood for Chhattisgarh (as well as opposition to the
Emergency). Later, Arjun Singh promoted another Kurmi member
of Parliament (MP) Chandulal Chandraker, who went on to become
the most well known advocate for the creation of a separate state in
the late 1980s and early 1990s (when he was also a national Congress
spokesperson in Delhi). Chhattisgarh had a considerably smaller upper
caste population than elsewhere in Madhya Pradesh (about 3 per
cent compared to 13 per cent across Madhya Pradesh)6 and a larger
proportion of the population belonged to OBC castes. This provided
an important backdrop for the politics Arjun Singh was to pursue.
Arjun Singh did not initially explicitly support the idea of statehood.
Instead, in the early 1980s, he made symbolic gestures to a Chhattisgarhi
identity by, for example, honouring ‘heroes’ of Chhattisgarh by erecting
statues, endowing a new university chair and so on. The first champions
of a Chhattisgarhi identity— in prose at least— were Chhattisgarhi
Brahmins. But the Chhattisgarhi identity promoted by Arjun Singh
explicitly reached out to lower castes too— OBCs, Scheduled Castes or
Satnamis— as well as adivasis (indigenous on tribal communities,
otherwise known as Scheduled Tribes). He sought to fan the resentment
of such groups about the domination of politics and
administration
in the region by a small elite of ‘non-Chhattisgarhi Brahmins’ such
as the Shukla brothers— his factional rivals. Both S. C. Shukla and
V. C. Shukla were sons of Ravishankar Shukla— the first chief minister
of Madhya Pradesh, whose political base was in Chhattisgarh. The
former (S. C.) was a key state-level leader, and the latter (V. C.) a
national player too. They were Kanyakubja Brahmins (who became
known as ‘non-Chhattisgarhi Brahmins’), a community who had
generally moved to Chhattisgarh in the last 100–200 years, often to take
up administrative jobs or positions in industry. They were more recent
arrivals than the landowning Saryupali Brahmins (who became known
as ‘Chhattisgarhi Brahmins’). Arjun Singh tried to woo rivals of the
Shuklas among lower castes, as well as Chhattisgarhi Brahmins, into
the Congress. V. C. Shukla (who developed a reputation for being
opposedto statehood), unsurprisingly, questioned the depth of Singh’s
commitment to statehood, or to the promotion of lower castes from the
region. He said: ‘Arjun Singh’s entire or sole aim was to weaken our
position in Chhattisgarh. Those that he promoted were not supporters
of Chhattisgarh, but opponents of ours.’7
By 1993, and possibly before, Arjun Singh had begun to speak
openly in favour of statehood for Chhattisgarh. It was also in this
period that the Chhattisgarh Rajya Nirman Manch (Chhattisgarh State
Creation Campaign) was formed to lead the campaign for a separate
state. The first resolution on statehood for Chhattisgarh was passed
in the Madhya Pradesh legislative assembly under Chief Minister
Digvijay Singh in 1994. However, arguably it was Arjun Singh’s
politics that laid the groundwork for a politics in which borders were
called into question. It was under Arjun Singh that a state-wide leader
had first entertained the idea of changing the borders of Madhya
Pradesh, although the demand for statehood in Chhattisgarh never
developed the character of a mass movement as in Jharkhand and
Uttarakhand.
In contrast to Arjun Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav (Chief Minister
of Uttar Pradesh from 1989–1991, 1993–1995, 2003–2007) was a
Socialist leader who rose to power on the back of a new social coalition
of OBCs, especially Yadavs, in eastern and central Uttar Pradesh (UP).
This was the high tide of the politics of Mandal and a central part of
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s platform was his support for caste-based
reservations. Yadav also encouraged the demand for a hill state for
reasons which were similar to Arjun Singh: to make life uncomfortable
for his opponents (for Mulayam Singh Yadav, this meant his opponents
in Congress and the BJP) and to consolidate his own political base in
UP outside the hills. In Mulayam Singh Yadav’s case, however, the
aspiring lower castes to whom he sought to appeal lay geographically
outside the putative breakaway region of Uttarakhand, which had an
overwhelmingly upper caste population.
Mulayam Singh Yadav realised the possibility of using the statehood
demand to consolidate his own position in UP outside the hills almost
unwittingly. Previously he had paid lip service to his appreciation of the
problems of the hills, misunderstood by planners in the plains areas of
the state. He passed a resolution supporting statehood after becoming
chief minister in 1993 and appointed the Kaushik Committee to look
into the grievances of the hills. It was only after he unintentionally
provoked mass popular mobilisation in the hills of Uttarakhand
that he saw the potential to use the idea of statehood in order to
pursue his own goals in the rest of UP. This mobilisation followed
the government’s attempt to implement the Mandal Commission
recommendations for 27 per cent reservations for OBCs, despite
the fact that OBCs comprised only 2 per cent of population in the
hill districts.
A series of protests began in July 1994 in the hills against the new
quotas in higher education because they were seen as discriminating
against the local population who would effectively lose places in local
universities as a result of the new affirmative action for OBCs. It was
feared that students would migrate to Uttarakhand to take up these
new reserved places in local universities. It should be noted that the
protestors in Uttarakhand were not protesting about reservations as
a wider point of principle but saw them as discriminating against
Uttarakhandis more generally because of the small number of OBCs
in the hills (Mawdsley 1996). In the early days, the protests were not
immediately concerned with the question of statehood. However
gradually, demonstrators began to fuse their frustration about the
new reservations policy with the longer standing demand for the hills
to be separated from the rest of UP. Before this, the idea of statehood
had been promoted by political parties more than civil society
movements. In the 1950s, the question of statehood had been raised
by P. C. Joshi, member of the Communist Party of India. The
Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD) was later formed in 1979 to campaign
for statehood, and leaders of the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) in the region supported the idea of statehood from the early
1980s. The anti-reservation protests began as non-party movements
led by students at first, but soon spread into a broader movement in
both regions of Uttarakhand (Kumaon and Garhwal). This movement
encompassed many older social movement activists as well as new
types of protestors including ex-servicemen. It seems unlikely that
the state government had anticipated that the decision to extend
reservations for OBCs in higher education institutions across Uttar
Pradesh would provoke a regional movement in Uttarakhand. As a top
bureaucrat in UP in the early 1990s said in an interview, confirming
the fears of those who argued for statehood for the hill region on the
basis of regional neglect, ‘Uttarakhand just didn’t figure too much in
mainline politics in Uttar Pradesh’.8
Once the protests had started, however, Mulayam Singh Yadav
made mileage of them for similar reasons that Arjun Singh had
encouraged the emergence of a regional identity in Chhattisgarh.
Yadav sought to use the protests to achieve two goals: first, to cement
a fraying political coalition among lower castes outside the hills (not
in the region demanding statehood like Arjun Singh) by portraying
the protestors in the hills as chauvinistic upper castes opposed to
reservations.For the first time, a state government dominated by OBCs,
Dalits and Muslims had come to power in Uttar Pradesh in 1993. This
was a coalition between Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan
Samaj Party or BSP (Hasan 1998: 161). However by mid-1994— just
the point at which the agitation in Uttarakhand began— there were
serious tensions between the coalition partners (Duncan 1997).9 The
crisis in Uttarakhand provided an opportunity for Mulayam Singh
Yadav to highlight his credentials as a champion of lower caste
empowerment through the reservations system. Yadav’s second goal
was to make life difficult for the BJP by portraying the party, which
supported statehood, as pro-upper caste. He also sought to increase the
disarray of the Congress Party in the state (and nationally) by exploiting
divisions between its biggest leader in Uttar Pradesh, three-time former
Chief Minister N. D. Tiwari who hailed from the hills of Uttarakhand,
and the Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. Yadav made deliberately
inflammatory statements and, as Mawdsley writes, it seemed that the
state government was actually trying to intensify the struggle— for
example, by calling a pro-reservation bandh in September 1994 (1997:
116). A series of subsequent incidents, including serious episodes of
police firing on protestors, increased the tension between the plains
and the hills. But although he labelled the protestors in Uttarakhand
as ‘anti-lower caste’ and ‘anti-reservation’, Yadav continued to say
that he supported the granting of statehood to the region.
These tactics left the Congress in a bind, especially because it was
supporting Mulayam Singh Yadav’s state government from the outside.
The Congress Party had been losing upper caste support to the BJP
for some time as many upper castes turned to Hindu nationalism and
the campaign for a Ram Mandir, which the BJP used to compete with
the politics of caste-based empowerment of the OBCs. The Congress,
therefore, did not want to lose further ground among upper castes by
appearing to oppose the demand for a hill state. In August 1994, at the
height of the protests in the hills, N. D. Tiwari— a Brahmin— was
reappointed as Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president,
replacing the backward caste Mahabir Prasad, in a bid to rejuvenate
the party organisation. 10 The chief minister skilfully exploited the
divisions between Prime Minister Rao and the UPCC chief. At the
state level, Tiwari began to campaign for Congress to withdraw
the support it was giving to the Yadav government from outside in
the legislative assembly because of its failure to deal appropriately
with the protests in Uttarakhand. However, Prime Minister Narasimha
Rao and Congress leaders at the centre did not support Tiwari and
simply urged the Chief Minister to negotiate with the protestors.
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s aim, wrote columnist Manoj Joshi, was
to use the Uttarakhand agitation to marginalise Tiwari and transform
him into a ‘minor hill politician’ and also to regain the momentum
he had lost while being in a coalition government with the BSP
(Joshi 1994). One Congress MP summed up the predicament of the
party: ‘Mulayam Singh is running the government with the help of
the Congress, yet he is blackmailing us. If we withdraw support, he
will say we are anti-reservation; if we don’t, he grows stronger at our
expense.’11 The result was that although the Narasimha Rao
government
played a delaying game over whether it supported statehood for
Uttarakhand, or not, a large degree of consensus in favour of statehood
emerged among political players in both the Uttarakhand region and
the parent state of UP.
Thus in both Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, tensions thrown
up by the rise of lower caste politics and the challenge to upper caste
social and political dominance, created reasons for chief ministers to
encourage the questioning of state borders. The political leadership of
north Bihar, on the other hand, made no pre-emptive strategic
decision
to sponsor a regional movement in south Bihar. This stemmed
in large part from fear of losing the revenues generated by industry in
Jharkhand, as well as the real threat of an existing statehood movement
in the region. However, there was also a political dynamic too.
Factional
competition within state politics in Bihar tended to be structured
around caste leaders rather than regional leaders— unlike Madhya
Pradesh (Singh 1975). This gave north Bihari politicians in Congress
less of an incentive to give encouragement to a regional movement in
Jharkhand because none of their major competitors within the party
were dependent on a power base in Jharkhand.

Creating New Political Space:

Political Entrepreneurs in the Periphery
So far, we have considered the possible incentives for chief ministers
to behave in a way that helped to question the fixedness of borders
in north India. There were also important and, in many ways,
independent developments occurring at the sub-state level as political
parties reacted to local social movements and sought to create new
electoral space for themselves. Regional political leaders created both
their own opportunities, and seized on those created by chief ministers,
to make space for themselves in regions that, as a result of what could
be called the political or demographic geography of empowerment,
lay outside the core political constituency of the whole state. This
section will focus particularly on why local leaders of the BJP came
to support calls for statehood that had been initially associated with
social movements or other political parties.
In each region, BJP leaders latched on to statehood as a means of
neutralising the appeal of a major competitor. In Uttarakhand, the
UKD, a regional party, established in 1979 to campaign for
statehood,
was the BJP’s main rival in their bid to dislodge the Congress.
In Jharkhand, the BJP sought to steal ground from the Jharkhand
Mukti Morcha (JMM), which was established in 1972 as a vehicle for
uniting worker and agrarian struggles by supporting the demand for
statehood (albeit for a truncated version of Jharkhand just comprising
the districts of south Bihar).12 It seems likely that the BJP (and Congress
who entered into an electoral pact with the JMM) saw advantages in
drawing the statehood issue back into electoral politics and thereby
encouraging the demobilisation of agitational politics led by non-party
formations. In Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, the BJP sought to distance
themselves from the existing demands for statehood by adopting
different
names for the state-to-be: Vananchal and Uttaranchal. The party
officially adopted the demands for these states in 1989. It is notable
that both these regions lay outside the principal arenas of caste-based
politics pursued by Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar and Mulayam Singh
Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. This made these regions more natural ground
for the BJP.
In Chhattisgarh, the BJP appeared to adopt the demand for
statehood
in their 1993 manifesto in order not to lose out to Congress if
the Congress also adopted this demand. One former BJP politician,
who supported the statehood idea, described the process as one of
“‘constructive competition” between the BJP and Congress. The
BJP thought if we don’t support creation of the state, the Congress
will and the Congress thought, if we don’t support state creation then
BJP will. So both parties supported state creation.’13 In the 1990 state
elections, the BJP had emerged as a strong challenger to the Congress
in Chhattisgarh— in both the tribal areas of the state (where the Jan
Sangh had historically had a presence) as well as the plains (where
their presence had previously been minimal). But they had suffered
a setback in the 1991 elections when the Congress achieved a clear
sweep of the region’s 11 parliamentary seats. After the death in 1995
of the leading Congress spokesperson for Chhattisgarh Chandulal
Chandraker, the BJP then seized the opportunity to take over
leadership
of the statehood campaign.14
As it had been for chief ministers, the idea of statehood was
attractive
to national and regional leaders of the BJP who were seeking to
widen the social base of their party. It is perhaps telling that one of the
national BJP leaders who was pivotal in overcoming the opposition
of north Bihar leaders to the creation of Jharkhand/Vananchal was
Govindacharya, the architect of the party’s policy of ‘social engineering’
and the general secretary responsible for Bihar. After the BJP’s former
leaders in Jharkhand, Inder Singh Namdhari and Samresh Singh
(who had pushed the party to accept the statehood demand in the
late 1980s), quit the party BJP in 1990, Govindacharya encouraged
the promotion of new regional leaders in Jharkhand. Key among
these was Babulal Marandi— a Santhal adivasi (and a former VHP
pracharak or worker) who went on to defeat JMM chief Shibu Soren
in 1998 and become the first chief minister of Jharkhand in 2000.15
Reaching out to lower castes was not such an issue for the BJP in the
upper caste dominated Uttarakhand hills. However, in Chhattisgarh,
key proponents of statehood within the BJP such as Chandrashekhar
Sahu and Keshav Singh Thakur, were also supporters of the ‘social
engineering’ approach. It could be argued that offering support
to campaigns for statehood was a means by which the BJP could
send signals to lower castes, or groups that felt excluded from the
ruling coalition while the region was part of Madhya Pradesh, while
seeking to construct electoral majorities that overcame what the party
regarded as the divisive potential of exclusive political appeals to caste
or tribal identities.
In each region, the BJP was also encouraged to support statehood
by their allies in the RSS, the Hindu nationalist volunteer social
organisation, who sought to minimise the disruptive implications of
social and economic change in the region. In Uttarakhand, this goal
took the form of a concern about the implications for national security
of large-scale migration from this hill region which bordered China.
Statehood was necessary for the region in order to enable economic
development to take place, they argued, and to stem migration (see,
for example, Nityanand 2004). In Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the
RSS and their political wing, the Jan Sangh (and later the BJP), wanted
to counter the influence of the church in tribal areas. Christian tribals,
who tended to be the more educationally and economically advanced
communities among tribals such as Jaipal Singh, had been at the
forefront of the demand for statehood in Jharkhand.
In all three new states, the main rhetorical explanation for the
statehood demand and the sloganeering used by BJP leaders was that
of regional neglect. By focusing attention on regional neglect and the
need for redistribution on a regional basis— from the parent state to
the new state, as a whole— leaders could use the statehood demand
in an effort to avoid specifying promises about the redistribution of
resources or power between different social groups within the region
itself. This was consistent with wariness about class-based, caste or
ethnic mobilisation of a type which some social movements had
attempted in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Thus, at the sub-state level,
party convergence around statehood represented another means of
coming to terms with new forms of political mobilisation. This had
the effect of helping to defuse possible opposition to statehood at a
later stage.
Conclusion
This chapter has considered the gradual evolution of agreement among
different political actors within regional arenas in favour of the creation
of the newest states in India from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar
Pradesh. It has emphasised the uneven geographical spread of lower
castes and medium-sized owner cultivators, as well as the organisation
of factional conflict in the parent states, as factors that help to
explain the willingness of state-wide leaders to make mileage out
of regional movements even though this meant countenancing the
division of their states. At the sub-state level, I have shown how
national
parties— especially the BJP— supported statehood in response
both to popular movements as well as a desire to build broad non-ethnic
regional political support bases. By converging in support of
statehood, regional political leaders sought to neutralise the appeals
to statehood made by rival political parties.
My intention in this chapter has not been to suggest that the creation
of new states was somehow an inevitable result of the evolution of a
new political settlement within north Indian states. In a federal system,
it is problematic to make a path-dependent argument — such that
change at one level of the system will lead deterministically to change
at another level. Instead, I have tried to suggest how by the late 1990s,
the conditions at the state level were fertile for intervention to create
new states by a national government that was so inclined. We should
be careful to avoid the risk of teleology. There was nothing inevitable
about the achievement of statehood for any of these regions as a result
of the evolution of political conditions within the sub-state regions or
their parent states.
The states could only be created by a sympathetic central
government.
This fact should also lead us not to over-emphasise the depth
of the pro-statehood sentiment held by regional politicians. They
may have assumed that the actual bifurcation of their states was not
a very likely outcome and so, politicising of borders appeared to be
a relatively low-cost political manoeuvre. Even if this was the case,
it seems likely that the slow dance of competing political parties and
politicians around the idea of statehood made it easier for a central
government to press ahead with the creation of states in these places
—and not other regions where a similar degree of consensus had not
emerged.
By looking at the deep regional politics of state reorganisation,
this chapter has challenged some overly top-heavy images of Indian
federalism. Precisely because the centre has not historically taken a
clear line on statehood demands in Hindi-speaking states, it left space
for the organic development of these demands through the political
process at the sub-national level.
Notes
1. The current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mayawati has also called
for her state to be divided into three. See, for example, ‘Mayawati for
Trifurcation of Uttar Pradesh’, Times of India, 11 December 2009.
2. Deeper analysis of the logic driving politics at each of the three levels
can be found in Tillin (forthcoming). This essay draws on interviews and
archival research conducted in each of the new states, their parent states
and Delhi.
3. This was partly a result of Madhya Pradesh’s formation as an
amalgamation
of Hindi-speaking regions hived off from the non-Hindi speaking
states created in 1956. No dominant state-wide political class subsequently
emerged in Madhya Pradesh and factionalism in the state’s Congress Party
was probably the most notorious in the country. See Wilcox (1968); Mitra
(1990).
4. In 1981, Arjun Singh established the Mahajan Commission to undertake
a survey of the OBC population in the state and make recommendations
to the government about their needs. The significance of Singh’s efforts
to introduce lower castes into politics was repeatedly noted by a variety
of interviewees during fieldwork in Chhattisgarh.
5. The average size of economical landholdings tends to be smaller in rice-growing
regions than wheat-growing areas, but unlike ‘all’ other major
rice-growing states in India, the majority of the area under rice cultivation
in Madhya Pradesh (of which most was in the Chhattisgarh region), was
comprised holdings of over 4 hectares (10 acres). See Government of
India (1970–71).
6. See 1931 census data in Jaffrelot (1996: 113).
7. Interview with V. C. Shukla, Raipur, 4 December 2007.
8. Interview, New Delhi, 17 September 2007.
9. In 1995, the BSP withdrew support to the government forcing Mulayam
Singh Yadav to resign.
10. ‘Tiwari has Task Cut Out for him in UP’, Times of India, 27 August 1994.
11. Congress MP Harikesh Bahadur, quoted in ‘Parties Make Capital of
Uttarakhand Stir’, Times of India, 9 September 1994.
12. Inder Singh Namdhari, BJP state president (1988–1990) was explicit about
this, explaining after he left the party because of differences with the state
leadership: ‘It was owing to this [statehood] demand that we were able to
compete with the JMM. But some leaders seem to be unable to swallow
the idea.’ Quoted in ‘Namdhari Hits Out at Bosses, Quits Post’, Hindustan
Time, 10 March 1990, Patna.
13. Interview, 7 December 2007, Raipur.
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———. 2001. Census of India 2001. Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs.
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———. 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India.
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———. 1997. Non-Secessionist Regionalism in India: The Demand for a Separate State
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———. 2002. ‘Redrawing the Body Politic: Federalism, Regionalism and the
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(Uttaranchal: Historical Perspective and extent of Development). Dehradun:
Chavi Prakashan.
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Tillin, L. 2011. ‘Questioning Borders: Social Movements, Political Parties and
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pp. 127–76. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 Part III
Languages and States:
Western and Southern India
 5
The Paradox of a Linguistic Minority
Rita Kothari

The case of the Sindhis as a linguistic minority in the post-colonial

nation–state is fraught with ironies: the only official classification
of the Sindhis is that of a ‘linguistic minority’; yet the post-partition
generation of Sindhis barely speaks the language. The federal design of
the nation–state divested the community of the purposes of retaining
its language, and now the same state incurs expenditure to ‘encourage’
the language through awards and promotional grants.
The Partition in 1947 led to the dispersion of the Sindhi
community
through the length and breadth of India. The opportunity to ‘re-
territorialise’ in the form of Gandhidham came at a time when most
people had already found new trades and occupations in various
Indian cities, and the community did not, by and large, see this second
uprooting as a viable choice.
After achieving economic stability, some Sindhis made a concerted
effort to concretise their identity around the nucleus of language. What
drove this effort was not so much a need for the state infrastructure
that would accompany the recognition of their language but a symbolic
reassurance of ‘belonging’ by being reflected in the state’s official
picture. By the time this desire was fulfilled, an entire generation had
grown up without feeling the need to speak or study Sindhi. A
subset
of this language question is the contested issue of whether Sindhis
should continue with the Perso-Arabic script or adopt the Devnagari
script. While the efforts to concretise their identity around the first two
co-ordinates were abortive, the last remained unresolved.
This chapter examines the dialectics between the community and
the new nation–state in the light of the three co-ordinates of identity
mentioned before. It argues that instead of becoming an organic
expression of pluralism in India, Sindhi became a structural and token
expression of pluralistic design. And yet, the narrative of the Sindhi
 Rita Kothari

minority in India is not one of marginalisation and disempowerment.

The economic success of the community obfuscates the ruptures in
the organic and mythic consciousness of its members.
If we do not inspire the young blood to learn Sindhi today, then the day
is not far when we will only have Sindhi surnames left to identify with! In
course of time if Sindhis do not speak, write or speak the language, then
we will lose the linguistic minority status itself (Wadhwani 2003).

Jethanand, the protagonist of Gobind Khushalani’s short story

‘Kahani Kismet Jee’ escapes from Sindh under life-threatening
circumstances,and arrives in India as a penniless stranger, only to rise to
riches within some years. In his old age, he feels the need to turn his
attention to his community and roots, only to realise that Sindhi which
forms the basis of both has begun to disappear from the lives of the
Sindhis. The narrative so far is constructed of the stuff of post-Partition
Sindhi success as well as failure in India. However, the narrative irony
of this particular story lies in the fact that Jethanand requests his old
friend Qasim in Pakistan to send him a Sindhi primer which he and
Qasim had jointly published for their firm. The primer was meant to
teach the language to the new immigrants — the Mohajjirs in Pakistan
— but now Jethanand needs it for his own community in India. The
two friends share nostalgic moments and also the agony of Sindhi
language on both sides of the border. It is not directly relevant to
discuss here how Jethanand’s friendship with Qasim across the borders
of India and Pakistan indicates the trans-border literary, linguistic
and personal relations between the Sindhi Hindus of India and the
Sindhis in Pakistan. Although these relations are shot through with
ambivalence, the two groups constitute for each other a friendly ‘other’,
a real and imaginary readership. They bond over the marginalisation
of Sindhi (despite the benign nation–state in India, and because of
draconian measures of Pakistan) in the subcontinent. This issue would
divert us from a discussion that intends to focus upon the Sindhis as
a linguistic minority in India.
Before we embark upon the discussion, it is necessary to qualify that
the Sindhi Hindus (displaced by Partition) are not the only Sindhi-speaking
community in India. Those identifying themselves as Kacchis,
Khojas and Memons in Gujarat, or as Tharis and Jaisalmeris on the
borders of Rajasthan also speak varieties of Sindhi, although their
self-identification may be different (Khubchandani 1991: 85–86).
However, it is the urban (and incidentally, Hindu) Sindhis who entered
 The Paradox of a Linguistic Minority

into a conversation with the nation–state about the recognition of

their language that form the fulcrum of this chapter. We shall revert
to them after a few general comments on the linguistic reorganisation
of states in India.
The imagery of the nation–state as a conglomeration of diverse
linguistic groups living in what are made to be ‘self-contained’ units
called states is very compelling. The linguistic reorganisation of India
has partly created and partly reinforced a conflation of territory and
language in the post-colonial Indian nation–state. It has led to what I
call a ‘terri-ethnic’ sense of identity — an ethnic identity that is derived
from language and territory — so that the answer to the question
who you are, is also the answer to the question where you are from,
leading to forms of ethnic essentialism. This terri-ethnic sense of
being ‘Indian’ informs much of the state’s chauvinism. Thus, as the
linguist Khubchandani notes, ‘the state reorganisation commission’s
efforts in 1956 to effect a coterminality between administrative units
and linguistic regions has converted cultural frontiers into political
frontiers’ (1997: 84).
The ground policies of cultural resources such as grants for
education,literature and publishing activities disbursed by the central
government are based upon the idea of linguistic groups with ‘states of
their own’. Without a linguistic territory, it is difficult to ‘imagine’ the
specific and regional sides of an ‘Indian identity’. Languages which are
not ‘major’ enough to have a linguistic state but possess a social
collectivity
through geographical concentration may still survive without
state support; but those which are neither major nor concentrated in a
specific territory lose their relevance over time — a fate that Sindhi is
inching towards. By not having a state to itself, Sindhi ranks alongside
Urdu and Sanskrit, the two languages it drew its model from, to rally
support for inclusion in the Eighth Schedule. However, being included
in the Constitution has not ensured the relevance of Sindhi, and at this
stage neither the absence nor the presence of a linguistic territory can
fortress a Sindhi identity. In order to understand the ramifications of
this situation, it is important to underscore the historical incident of
Partition which displaced the Hindi minority of Sindh; the absence
of a designated territory in divided India which forced them to scatter
all over the country; the consequent erosion of community cohesion;
and the peculiar position of Sindhi as a distinct and stateless language,
written in the Perso-Arabic script. As a post-Partition community,
the Sindhis entered into three not-so-simultaneous levels of dialogue
with the nation–state: land, language and script. Of these, language
in particular, became the nucleus of Sindhi identity, and although
the community attributes its anxiety about the diminishing use of the
language to its lack of territory, the struggle over region was short-lived
and half-hearted. Nonetheless, I have provided below in broad strokes,
the attempt made by at least one Sindhi to reclaim a small territory for
Sindhis, or rather to rebuild a Karachi in divided India.
Chalo, Chalo Gandhidham
As refugees, Sindhis were not expected in India. In light of the relatively
peaceful conditions in Sindh in 1947, the Indian government had not
made any preparations for rehabilitating the Sindhis in a single place,
but had called upon various state governments to contribute to the
process
when the migration began. The most unique event in this history
occurred in the region of Kutch in Gujarat. Kutch was not supposed to
receive the refugees from Sindh, but through what would seem public
and private partnership, the region created an alternative territory for
the Sindhis to settle in and reclaim their language and culture.
Bhai Pratap, a well known businessman and national activist from
Sindh, requested the Indian government to provide them a region
where the displaced Sindhis could live as a single community. Through
conversations amongst community members, and also with Gandhi,
Kutch emerged as the natural choice because of the trade and cultural
links it shared with Sindh (see Kothari 2007). Bhai Pratap’s concern
was twofold: he wished to make opportunities of livelihood
available
to the Sindhis and also to provide them with a means of
maintaining
their collective identity. Gandhi responded to this request and
urged the Maharao of Kutch to come forward and help rehabilitate
the community in Kutch. The Maharao granted 15,000 acres of land
near the port of Kandla for the purpose of building a new township,
which came to be called Gandhidham. On the basis of this offer, Bhai
Pratap founded the Sindhu Resettlement Corporation or the (SRC)
(a non-governmental organisation) whose main aims were to build
Gandhidham (wherein plots of land were allotted to shareholders on
easy terms) and to undertake or aid industrial, commercial and other
public utility projects.
Bhai Pratap came up with ingenious methods of luring Sindhis to
Gandhidham. These included sending well-known Sindhi singers to
relief camps to urge displaced Sindhis by making them sing along with
songs such as the one below:
 Pyaaro Pyaaro Gandhidham
Desh asanjo, vesh asanjo
Hik jahiri aahe raunak
Hik jahiri aahe rahini
Hik jahiri aahe dharti
Our beloved Gandhidham
Our nation, our clothes
The same spectacle
The same lifestyle
The same earth.
(Translation by author)

This building up on the similarities between Sindh and Kutch in terms

of ‘desh’ and ‘vesh’ did not wash with the community, or at least with
those who had choices, or who had managed to settle down in bigger
cities such as Ahmedabad, Mumbai or Delhi. The project became
a reality only after 1952 and by then most Sindhis were scattered
in different parts of India, and they chose not to uproot themselves
a second time. In any case, it is not clear except through anecdotal
information whether all Sindhis knew about the Gandhidham plan,
or whether it had been presented as a viable option. Resistance must
also have come from the hostile conditions of Kutch which is a dry
wilderness with no industry, vegetation or urbanisation. For better or
worse, most Sindhis had gravitated to urban parts of India and chosen
to stay as members of a linguistic minority in states that offered better
business opportunities.
Apart from this instance, and occasional petitions for renaming the
Ulhasnagar Camp as Sindhunagar, Sindhis on the whole did not pursue
the demand for a separate territory. However, the lack of territory as an
emotive and binding space is a leitmotif in the community’s discourse
about language, which forms the chief nucleus of Sindhi identity.
Scheduling Existence
Sindhi has a complex narrative in India: as a legacy brought to India
partly by displaced migrants, and partly created by speech-based
communities that resided in India prior to Partition. It has a long,
multilayered and sophisticated history of both oral and written
literature,
publishing and polemical activities. It is by no means an
‘underdeveloped’ language. However, by virtue of being a frontier
language, its evolution and vocabulary have made it distinct from other
languages of the western region of India, what with hybrid
combinations
from old Prakrit on the one hand, and Persian and Balochi on
the other. The public domain in India had no room for Sindhi, and
the Sindhi businessman had to learn local languages in states like
Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi in order to survive.
Despite this, the community managed to build several educational
institutions, especially in Bombay, by the mid-1950s, long before the
language was included in the Schedule. It might be worth asking as
Gupta, Abbi and Aggrawal do, ‘why this eagerness of a community
that their language be included in the Eighth Schedule? What is the
fascination the Schedule offers these speech communities? What
power or status does it bestow on the languages that are included in
this hallowed “sanctum sanctorum” and conversely, what benefits
are withheld from languages that fail to be listed as members of this
elite club?’ (1995 : xi) When members of the Sindhi community began
to negotiate with the nation–state for inclusion in the Schedule, the
motivation was not so much economic support, but rather a symbolic
recognition of their existence in the official picture of the state. The
long-drawn episode which finally culminated in the inclusion of Sindh
in the Eighth Schedule in 1967 is important for us to understand today,
not so much for what it achieved (or failed to), but to understand the
terms of the specific forms of ‘Indianness’ that the community imbibed
in its political campaign for acceptance.
My narrative about the language is based on the archives of Jairamdas
Daulatram, a close associate of Gandhi and the governor of Bihar and
Assam. Jairamdas Daulatram’s papers show how the Sindhis, after
achieving some economic stability in India, began to articulate
anxieties about recognition at multifarious levels. A medley of letters
— seeking a time slot in All India Radio, or a performance slot in
national festivals, or requests for a Master’s degree in Sindhi literature,
or consideration of official posts in the Legislative Assembly — among
Jairamdas Daulatram’s papers recreate the poignant and interesting
story of this mercantile community’s efforts at unmercantile forms of
representation in India.
The conflation of language and territory in the wake of linguistic
reorganisation generated much discussion amongst the leaders of
the Sindhi community. While the Sindhis themselves, on account of
being a microscopic community dispersed in various parts of India,
did not stubbornly pursue the project of gaining a territory, they were
certainly concerned about their invisibility in India’s cultural spaces. A
realisation that only languages included in the Schedule were eligible
for competitions, awards and other forms of recognition at the national
level made the Sindhis feel that they could claim to belong to India
only by being represented. This led to nitpicking discussions about
what ‘region’ meant in the contexts of the term ‘regional language’
and whether it was possible to break the synonymy between region
and language. Among one of the early letters received by Jairamdas
Daulatram, the writer Ghanshyam Shivdasani states, ‘Sindhi cannot
be a regional language as there is no particular region in India where
it is spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of the region. But it can
be included in the schedule of languages given in the Constitution.
Sanskrit and Urdu are included in the schedule. Both of these languages
are not regional languages’ (Shivdasani 1955). The counterargument
to this claim could be that the cultural heritage of Urdu and Sanskrit
was far superior to Sindhi, a fact that Shivdasani was aware of. Hence
he goes on to the next argument in favour of Sindhi by quoting from
articles 344 (1) and 351 of the Indian Constitution: ‘The Schedule as
has a reference to a particular Article of the Constitution which deals
with the growth and enrichment of the Hindi language. The Languages
mentioned in the schedule are the languages from which help can be
derived for enrichment of Hindi. Sindhi can as well be included in
the schedule because Sindhi also can enrich Hindi in some respect.’
This harnessing of the Hindi sentiment became one of the central
rallying points for Sindhi, serving to illustrate how the community
shaped and fashioned its linguistic demands in the light of the state’s
bias towards Hindi.
In his reply to Shivdasani’s letter, Jairamdas Daulatram suggests
that the ‘type of representation that is needed [to include Sindhi in the
ES] is to be of a fairly technical character’ (Daulatram 1955) and what
ensues from this point is an entire discourse on Sindhi’s ancient links
with the Aryan civilisation and how the language flourished along the
banks of the river Indus. Daulatram goes on to say that the Sindhis
‘should show the importance of the Sindhi language, not only from
the point of view of the Sindhi refugees but also in view of its
inherent,
basic ancient links with various languages of the country’ (ibid.).
Another chain of arguments in the same letter shows how Sindh had
ancient links from Assam to Gujarat, in both the western and eastern
coasts of India. Therefore, goes the argument, the Sindhi language
‘has certain inherent links with Indian languages and deserves to be
studied even from the national point of view’ (ibid.).
 Daulatram thus cushions the legitimacy of Sindhi by appealing to
its Aryan antiquity on the one hand, and its pan-Indian status on the
other. What remains unspoken in this entire process is Sindh’s
intimate
connection with Persian, which apparently had no space in the
community’s parleys with the government. I will deal with this very
telling omission later in the chapter.
For now, we return to the problem of gaining ‘official’ recognition.
Another very crucial segment of the community’s dialogue with the
nation–state is the playing of the number game. Daulatram warned
his community leaders that the speakers of some other languages
not recognised in the Constitution may be larger in number than the
Sindhis, and hence the enumerative argument as the basis for
representation
needed to be played out carefully. According to him, ‘For an
effective argument it would be better to give the number of Sindhis and
not only displaced persons. This number would include the displaced
persons and the previous settled Sindhis’ (Daulatram n.d.). The well
known linguist Khubchandani documented his reservations about
this argument by pointing out the fragile grounds on which numbers
and consequent demands of representation stand. According to him,
the evolution of Sindhi as a full-fledged language with a long history
of writing, publishing and polemical activities was sufficient enough
reason for its inclusion in the Schedule. He also argued against the
tendency of tracing ‘inherent’ links with Sanskrit and Hindi, so as to
suggest that some languages were more eligible on grounds of
proximity
with Sanskrit and Hindi. This, according to Khubchandani, went
against a democratic polity that needs to create space and relevance for
a pluralistic acceptance of languages. To put it simply, Khubchandani
(2007) felt that Sindhi needed to be viewed favourably for its survival
as a rich literary and political tradition, for its will and strength in the
difficult circumstances of post-Partition India.
Khubchandani’s fears about essentialising Sindhi as an Aryan
language remained unheeded in a community that became busy
fashioning
itself to suit the ‘Indian’ ethos as defined and propagated by
the nation–state. Jairamdas Daulatram’s standing as a spokesperson
of the government held sway and determined an Aryan construction
of the Sindhi language which laid the foundation not only for the
memorandum submitted to the government, but also for the self-perception
of the community at large. The efforts of the community
paid off 20 years after its arrival in India, a sufficient period for an
entire generation to have grown up wondering whether there was any
point in speaking Sindhi at all. In any case, the judgement appeared
in the Lok Sabha session on 7 April 1967, during discussion on the
Constitution (Twenty-first Amendment) Bill seeking the inclusion of
Sindhi in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution with Atal Bihari
Vajpayee’s oft-quoted support to the language: ‘Sindhi is one of our
national languages. India’s soul speaks through Sindhi. I speak through
Hindi. But Sindh is my mousi (aunt) and I respect Sindhi as much as
Hindi’ (Sharma 2006: 239–40).
Script: Fishing Mohenjodaro
In 1972, five years after Sindhi had been recognised in the constitution,
Narayandas Malkani, a well known Congress leader from Sindh
mentioned in the Preface to his autobiography:
Some friends asked me a sudden question, which script would you use
for this autobiography? I could not answer this question immediately.
Although I can read the Nagri script, I can’t write in it. I hope that
this autobiography will be available in the Nagri script also. (Malkani
1973: 7)

Malkani wrote his autobiography in the Perso-Arabic script, since that

was the one he had grown up with. At the same time, he was required
to respond to the question of why wouldn’t he write his autobiography
in Devnagari? This episode leads us to a very polarised, bitter and
long-drawn battle over the script for Sindhi that took place in the late
1950s and lasted for almost two decades.1
During the discussions on language, Jairamdas Daulatram advised
his community to take a less ‘sentimental’ view of script, and suggested
switching to Devnagari, given the post-Partition associations with the
Perso-Arabic script. Outlined once again as a strategy for marshalling
forceful arguments in favour of Sindh’s inclusion in the Schedule, the
script issue evoked far more resistance than a selective theory about the
origin of the language. Unlike the history of the language, the script
impinged on everyday practice and became a bone of contention
between those who wished to continue with the Perso-Arabic and those
who advocated switching to Devnagari. It is important to mention
here that historically the British had consolidated the Perso-Arabic
script out of several possibilities — Devnagari being one — and all
dissension, if any, by Hindus or Muslims of Sindh, was only on grounds
of phonology, or lexicon but not on religion. The post-Partition phase
in India witnessed the perception of script as an entity different from
language, and also as a site of Muslim domination.
In the initial phase of the debate about the script, Daulatram’s
plea was made on the grounds that Sindhi belongs to the Indic family
of languages and all Indic languages use one or the other form of
Devnagari writing. Associated with mainstream politics in India
and Sindh, Daulatram believed firmly in the unified and assimilative
notion of identity. He therefore urged Indian Sindhis to blend with
their host populations and not make much of their distinctness.
Perhaps in the same assimilative vein, Daulatram felt that the future
of Sindhi lay in its indigenisation in post-independent India. He was
supported in this claim by anti-Arabic thinkers such as Loknath Jetley,
Ghanshyam Shivdasani and Tarachand Gajra. It is important to note
that Jairamdas Daulatram’s companions belonged to a revivalist school
of thought among the Sindhis. The pre-Partition engagements of
Gajra and Jetley show a clear inclination towards a purificatory view
of the language and religion which they believed had been much too
Islamised. Jairamdas Daulatram traced the Sindhi letters to the Brahmi
script and argued that even the seals and coins at Mohenjodaro showed
the presence of Devnagari (see Daulatram 1993). As time went by,
and the pro-Arabic group showed strong resistance, the pro-Devnagari
group resorted to a strong communal rewriting of Sindhi history.
But before we come to that stage, let us take a look at the pro-Arabic
group. Tirth ‘Vasant’, Lekhraj Aziz and Wadhwani have argued the
aspirations of the section that supported the Perso-Arabic script. To
match Daulatram’s seals, the Perso-Arabic section deconstructed the
Mohenjodaro fish and argued that it was the origins of the Arabic
letters. This school also argued that only the Arabic script could carry
all the sounds of the Sindhi language. As both groups created divergent
narratives of the past, and engaged in writing ‘authentic’ histories of
Sindh to justify which script was natural, ancient, relevant, meaningful
and more importantly, native, they also engaged in their own post-Partition
self-definition (Figure 5.1). I find it useful here to present
before you some statements gleaned from this controversy.
For instance, T. T. Wadhwani refers to the gandi zehniyat (dirty
mentality
of the Devnagari script), underlying the arguments forwarded
by the pro-Devnagari school, especially the one to the effect that the
Arabic script reeks of Muslim domination. According to Wadhwani:
 Figure 5.1: A pro-Arabic group staging a protest in Delhi, 1967

Source: Courtesy of Kishore Jetley.

‘It is in the Arabic script that our Gita, Yoga Vashisht, Ramayana and
Mahabharata exist. Are they any less sacred because they are in the
Sindhi script? On the other hand, if there are awful books in Devnagari
script, do they become beautiful merely because they are in Devnagari?
(Wadhwani 1962: 32).
He goes on to say, ‘They [the pro-Devnagari] say that Sindhi script
should not exist because it is Islamic, they may say in future that the
Sindhi language should not exist because it has poetry by Muslim
poets’ (ibid.).
Broadly speaking, the supporters of Devnagari underscored the
need to blend in with other linguistic groups in India, which the
supporters
of the Arabic script perceived as a ‘sell-out’ and a falsification
of Sindh’s literary heritage. The former argued for the possibility of
readership within India, while the latter expressed concern about the
loss of readership in Sindh, where their compatriots could not read
Devnagari. The Devnagari group raked over the history of partition and
memory of communal politics, while the Arabic group drew attention
to the secular nation–state and its support of Urdu. Even in the midst
of differences, some issues must have been clear to the sparring groups:
the fact that the Perso-Arabic script would have to struggle for its
survival in India and that state support, at least in tacit ways, was
extended to the Devnagari script. The issue was not resolved; while
some schools continue to teach Sindhi in the Arabic script, others
now use Devnagari, and the simultaneity persisted without being
acknowledged or even recognised as the happy coexistence of both
scripts. Interestingly, in a nation–state that was asking for straitjacket
definitions of culture and representation, the Indian rupee did not
include the Sindhi script of either kind because the community was
officially required to come to a consensus about one or the other. As
things stand now, the Sindhi intelligentsia laments the diminishing
usage of spoken Sindhi, and worries about the script have receded,
by and large. Also, the availability of script software has made the
entire question obsolete.
The discussion in the previous section of this chapter focused on
three instances of successful and unsuccessful, half-hearted and
animated
negotiations that the Sindhi community made within its own self
and with the state. In preparing a political pitch for the government,
the community took a look at itself and invented some old and new
mythologies to ‘justify’ itself within the contexts of a nation where
representation was possible only on certain grounds, and their lack
meant an absence from the official discourse of the state.
It may also be useful to briefly touch upon another leitmotif of
Sindhi identity which they negotiated amongst themselves, (and
perhaps
less self-consciously) through everyday practices. I have discussed
elsewhere how the Hindu Sindhis of India come with a long legacy of
a blurred and quasi-syncretic understanding of religion (see Kothari
2007). Centuries of exposure to different forms of Islamic rule, Sufi
traditions, Hinduism (but without an emphasis upon the differences
between Shaivism and Vaishnavism) had made the Hindu Sindhis fairly
atypical examples of Hinduism. Shades of such looseness fortunately
continue to be mirrored in the modes of self-perception and the
religious practices of the Sindhis in India. However, there are also
forms of closure and rigidly Hindu self-definitions in Sindhis who
belong to certain parts of India. Against this backdrop, it is important
to see how the Sindhis felt the need to invent a form of commonality
through the figure of Jhulelal as their chief rallying symbol in post-independent
India. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide the
origins of Jhulelal and the almost conscious ways in which the Sindhis
in India made him their symbol, conferring upon themselves a ‘normal’
Hindu identity. However, what I wish to underscore here is that forms
of coherence were achieved through the satsangs (spiritual gatherings)
that the Sindhis followed, the business practices they enjoined, and
the insertion of Jhulelal into their religioscape.
The three issues of land, language and script are interlinked as
moments of self-definition of a culturally distinct (but eager to blend)
minority in the post-colonial nation–state. The terms of assimilation
such as the subservience to Hindi, the philological and etymological
emphasis upon Indo-Aryan-ness, the proximity with Sanskrit and the
use of Devnagari indicate a gentle modification of the Sindhi
identity
towards a particular form of Indian-ness. Over a period of time,
instances of community projection coupled with certain sociological
experiences I have discussed elsewhere (see Kothari 2007) effected a
gradual erasure of ‘Islamic influences’ among Sindhis — a pristine
and Aryan historiography that focused on Sindh as a primal site of
the Indus Valley Civilisation has come to be circulated widely among
the intelligentsia. Although not all members of the community
abandonedthe mixed legacy of Hindu–Islam syncreticism, it got reduced
to a much quieter acknowledgement among some members of the
migrant generation. The interaction with the nation–state discussed
hitherto also illustrates the making of a minority discourse, the need to
establish a glorious past for acceptance in the present and the anxiety
to create symbols and signposts. We also witness from this point on
a shifting in the community’s concerns from ‘being’ to ‘preserving’
and thus shaping a minority discourse. The lived reality of the Sindhi
community shows diminishing signs of the language, and ironically,
the community has more awards than writers, and more writers than
readers. The social effects of deterritorialisation and dehistoricisation
have led to a cultural vacuum among the post-Partition generations,
who describe themselves as Sindhis if they have to, but don’t know
what that means in the absence of a language and territory.
I would like to conclude this chapter by recounting an episode about
how the conflation of the ground realities of language and territory
confers a recognisable identity to a common Indian, and the absence
of which leads to an ignorance about the existence of such
communities.
While perusing the files of Jairamdas Daulatram (classified as
files of limited access in the National Archives of Delhi because of his
tenure as the Governor of Assam), I was asked by a suspicious clerk
why I needed to read about Pakistan and what business did I have
reading Urdu papers. On replying that I was reading Sindhi papers,
and I had to refer to the pre-migration period of the Sindhis, I was
told, ‘First you tell me you are interested in the Sindhi language, now
you go around reading on border issues, what does one have to do
with other? I will not let you copy those Urdu letters.’ If such a view
exists in the National Archives of Delhi, a state institution whose
officials are expected to be aware of the different parts of India, its
communities and languages — the struggles of the recognition of the
language mean little at ground level. My argument is that instead of
becoming an organic expression of pluralism, Sindhi has become a
structural expression of pluralistic design. Having said that, it must be
acknowledged that the average Sindhi businessman has flourished in
India; his stereotype is all too visible and common, even if his history
and culture remain unknown to most.

Note
1. The controversy over script in the Sindhi community carries partial
resonances of the way Urdu, both as a language and a script, came to be
associated with the Muslim community in the post-independent India.
Aijaz Ahmad mentions how ‘Independence and Partition were doubtless
key watersheds in the chequered history of the Urdu language and its
literature, in the sense that the thematics of this literature as well as the
reading and writing communities were fragmented and recomposed
drastically in diverse ways’ (1996: 191). However, the resonances are
partial to my mind, because unlike Urdu, Sindhi saw a division between
the same community of Hindu Sindhis living in the same nation–state
of India.

References
Ahmed, Aijaz. 1996. ‘In the Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation
and Community, 1947–65’, in Aijaz Ahmed (ed.), Lineages of the Present,
pp. 191–220. Delhi: Tulika.
Daulatram, Jairamdas. 1955. ‘Reply to Ghanshyam Shivdasani’, 19 Files of
Jairamdas Daulatram. Delhi: National Archives.
———. n.d. ‘Note on “Regarding Recognition of Sindhi Language”’, Serial
number 75/184, Files of Jairamdas Daulatram. Delhi: National Archives.
Gupta, R. S., Anvita Abbi and Kailash S. Aggarwal. ed.1995.Language and
the State: Perspectives on the Eighth Schedule. Delhi: Creative Books.
Khubchandani, L. M. 1991. Language, Culture, and Nation-Building: Challenges
of Modernisation. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies.
———. 1997. Revisualising Boundries: Analysis of Plurilingual Ethos . Delhi: Sage
Publications.
———. 2007. ‘Personal Interview with Rita Kothari’, 3 February.
Kothari, Rita. 2007. The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. Delhi:
Orient Blackswan.
Malkani, Narayandas. 1973. ‘Preface’, Nirali Zindagi Zindagi (An Unusual
Life). Mumbai: Navrashtra Press.
Sharma, Mohanlal. 1993. Sindhua Jee Khoja (In Quest of Sindhu). Delhi:
Mohanlal Sharma, Pratap Nagar.
Sharma, Suresh. ed. 2006. Language in Contemporary India , 2 vols. Delhi: Vista
International.
Shivdasani, Ghanshyam. 1955. ‘Letter to Jairamdas Daulatram’, 17 September,
Files of Jairamdas Daulatram. Delhi National.
Wadhwani, J. 2003. ‘Special Officer’ for Sindhis: J. T. Wadhwani asks Dy. P. M.
to invoke Article 350-B of the Constitution’, Interview with Mahesh
Vaswani, Sindhishaan, April.
Wadhwani, T. T. 1962. Sindhi Bolia Jee Lipi Keri? (What should be the Script
for the Sindhi Language?). Delhi: Sindhi Boli Ain Lipi Sabha.
 6
Political Currents in Maharashtra:
Language and Beyond*
Usha Thakkar and Nagindas Sanghavi

Maharashtra is the second largest among India’s 28 major states

and five Union Territories in terms of population and the third largest
in area. Its per capita income is 40 per cent higher than the all-India
average. It has the country’s second largest urban population with about
43 persons of every 100 living in towns and cities (Human Development
Report Maharashtra 2002: 2). The state however cannot be treated
as one homogeneous entity. It comprises broad, distinct regions like
Marathwada, Vidarbha and Western Maharashtra and Konkan, each
with a varying cultural nuance or attitude, diverse natural endowments
and different levels of economic and social development. Marathwada,
which was once a part of the erstwhile Nizam’s Hyderabad State, has
distinct cultural traits inherited from there. It has a relatively higher
Muslim population followed by Budhhist population. Vidarbha,
having been a part of the Hindi belt earlier, is more attuned to the
cultural practices of that region. Western Maharashtra is different
from these two regions, and also has extreme variations within it.
The industrialised and urbanised Mumbai–Thane belt and Pune have
a large slum population which is not homogeneous; it consists of
people from various states (ibid.: 30). Maharashtra was never a political
unit till 1960. As Y. D. Phadke points out: ‘At no time in history of
India, all the sub-regions which now constitute Maharashtra, were
politically one’ (1979: 32).
Though Maharashtra has neither remained great (maha), nor is it
a nation (rashtra), its sense of inflated identity and regional ego
continue
to survive. Despite the lack of political homogeneity, the concept
of the identity of Maharashtra that has evolved over centuries has
remained strong. Shivaji and Tilak were the brave heroes who are even
today remembered with great reverence. Maharashtra has been the
birth place of many progressive movements and social reformers and
its people are known for their allegiance to law and order and respect
 Political Currents in Maharashtra: Language & Beyondm

for scholarship. The comments of some leaders in the recent past

display its excessive pride for cultural traditions and identity. Some of
them are: ‘Other states have geography, Maharashtra has history too.’
Or ‘If Maharashtra dies, the nation dies; the cart of the nation cannot
be in motion without the Marathas’. When Y. B. Chavan was invited
to join the central cabinet, the obvious reaction of the multitudes of
the people of Maharashtra was that ‘Sahyadri has rushed to help the
Himalayas’. Such slogan-mongering is by and large an attempt to
rest on past achievements.
The establishment of the new state of Maharashtra in 1960, based
on Marathi language, stimulated new aspirations among people. This
naturally generated new politics that brought in new players and gave
rise to new challenges in the field. Much has, however, changed by
the first decade of the twenty-first century. Changing political culture,
melting social ethos, new economic forces, increasing consumerism,
ruthless competitiveness and manipulative politics have brought
about a sea change in perspectives and working in public life. The
issue of identity surfaces at regular intervals at all levels, but often for
non-serious or political purposes, turning non-issues into issues. This
chapter attempts to show glimpses of currents and undercurrents of
the journey of Maharashtra after it got its political identity based on
Marathi language. The first section deals with the historical context
and the second outlines the electoral politics of the state since 1960.
The following sections focus on Shiv Sena, the role of the Marathas,
the Dalit politics and issues of Vidarbha and Marathwada. The last
section presents the conclusions.
Historical Context
Much of what Maharashtra is today has been carved out of the province
and later the state of Bombay or Mumbai. The province encompassed
much of western and central India, as well as parts of post-partition
Pakistan. The area was also honeycombed with numerous native states.
During the British rule, the Marathi-speaking people were scattered
in the two British Indian provinces of Bombay and Central Province
and Berar, besides the state of Hyderabad and several other small
states ruled by Maratha princes (Phadke 1979: 33).
The cultural identity of Maharashtra has suffered from a double
jeopardy of such territorial trifurcation and social fracturing along
caste lines and the historical experiences are still so fresh that these
divisions are neither forgotten nor are they forgiven by those who claim
 m Usha Thakkar and Nagindas Sanghavi

to be the victims of these diversions. This double jeopardy has led to

fragmentation and polarisation of political attitudes and approaches
and exacerbated mutual hostility and suspicion. The ongoing stream
of political events and pressures, in addition, play their own role.
The earliest clear manifestation of Maharashtrian identity can
be traced to Shivaji, a sagacious and farsighted ruler of seventeenth
century India and the founder of the Maratha empire. Playing Delhi
and Bijapur against each other, he survived onslaughts of Mughals
by adopting guerrilla tactics and crowned himself as the king in 1674.
He is considered to be a great hero by the people of Maharashtra.
The expression ‘Maratha Tituka Melavava, Maharashtra Dharma
Vadhawava’ (Bring as many people into the Maratha domain as
possible and expand the tenets of Maharashtra) became very popular
after his rule.
Soon after his death, Shivaji’s kingdom was almost destroyed by
Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor. However, when Mughal empire
was tottering to its grave in the first quarter of the eighteenth century,
the Peshwas who were Brahmin prime ministers of the successors
of Shivaji, revived and expanded Maratha hegemony by forging a
confederacy that aspired to replace the Mughals. The Maratha empire
however died inspite of its struggle to be reborn, leaving behind a
vacuum that was filled up by the British East India Company. The
last attempt was the resistance put up by Peshwa Nana Saheb, Tatya
Tope, Lakshmibai of Jhansi in 1857 which was crushed in 1858.
The Brahmin supremacy of the Peshwas coined the contemptuous
phrase: ‘Sade Tin Takkyenchi Sanskriti’ (the culture of three and half
per cent), which indicated how the Brahmins enjoyed benefits which
was disproportionate to their meager number.
This span of time is also the period when Marathi identity further got
fractured along caste lines. The deep-rooted prejudices of traditional
society did a permanent damage because fissures that developed
during this period are still festering, even after nearly two centuries
and they still actively impinge on political alignments in Maharashtra
of today. The political hegemony enjoyed by Marathas and Brahmins
and the resultant patronage made both these communities owners of
vast tracts of land. As the rural elite, they utilised and exploited the
cheap labour available from the depressed castes and the economic
exploitation set scheduled castes against both the Marathas and
Brahmins. Social reformers like Jyotiba Phule, Vitthal Ramji Shinde
and later Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar worked hard for the upliftment of
the oppressed classes and their well-being, making them conscious of
the injustices inherent in the caste system.
The leaders of Maharashtra had been in the forefront of the
formation
and working of the Indian National Congress, since its inception
in the then Bombay, in 1885. The long tradition of scholarship and
an uncanny capacity to understand and adjust to changing scenario
prompted the Brahmins to take to new English education like fish to
water and put them in the forefront of public life and agitations, either
constitutional or violent, against British domination. It is interesting to
note that many illustrious and sagacious leaders like Mahadev Govind
Ranade, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale, as also Vasudev Balvant Phadke, the Chaphekar brothers,
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar are all Chitpavan Brahmins. Tilak was
the undisputed leader of the extremist wing of the Congress. For more
than two decades, Maharashtra was synonymous with the face of Tilak
and it was he who both represented and sculpted Maharashtrian
identity in its most vocal form. The cult of Shivaji and the festival of
Hindu God Ganesh that he initiated are still very popular. After his
death in 1920, Mahatma Gandhi emerged as a colossus on the political
scene and the country was agog with the spirit of nationalism.
Concurrent with the movement for independence was the demand
for linguistic reorganisation of provinces. The unwieldy and
linguistically
heterogeneous provinces created several administrative
problems for the people as well as the administrators and breaking
them up into more viable units seemed to be a logical move. While
demand for linguistic provinces was gaining strength in several parts
of India, the political leadership in Maharashtra was deeply engrossed
in national issues. The need for regional and linguistic identification
became vocal in course of time. According to Y. D. Phadke, ‘Unlike
the powerful movements for the creation of separate provinces of Bihar,
Orissa, Andhra and Karnataka, the campaign for the formation of
Samyukta Maharashtra was relatively of recent origin. Though some
prominent intellectuals and well known Marathi writers, for quite
some time, toyed with the idea of a separate province of the Marathi-speaking
people no vigorous campaign was launched till 1946.’
(1979: 66).
A group of journalists and writers issued an appeal in November
1939 asking people to join a new organisation called the Samyukta
Maharashtra Sabha. The signatories to this appeal included G. T.
Madkholkar, S. S. Navare and T. V. Parvate. The new organisation
was formed in Bombay on 28 January 1940. It claimed to have
support from all parties, but could not succeed in making its demand
a lively issue. The sentiments were not matched by any notable
political
action. The demand for Samyukta Maharashtra was revived
at the 30th session of the Marathi Sahitya Parishad at Belgaum on
12 May 1946, and a resolution clearly delineating the constituent
units of Samyukta Maharashtra was passed.
The years immediately before and after independence were the
years of momentous events in India and the issue of linguistic reorganisation
was dwarfed by the partition and transfer of power with
its resultant and concomitant complications and happenings that
threatened the very existence of the country. Neither leaders nor
people had the time or energy to address the issue of linguistic organisation
of states. The Dar Commission (1948) observed that the
formation of provinces on exclusively or even mainly linguistic
considerations
was not in the larger interests of the Indian nation. The
JVP Committee (consisting of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel
and Pattabhi Sitaramaiyya) report (1949) was not as strong as the
Dar Commission’s report. After the Constitution came into force, the
issue of linguistic states seemed to have taken a back seat. But this
was not to be: Andhra erupted in violence following the death of Potti
Sriaramulu after a prolonged fast on 15 December 1952. The state
of Andhra had to be constituted immediately and the entire issue of
linguistic reorganisation was submitted to the States Reorganisation
Commission, a three-member commission which was formed in
1953 with S. Fazl Ali as its chairman and H. N. Kunzru and K. M.
Panikkar as two other members.
The demand for Samyukta Maharashtra caught momentum in
the 1950s and the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad was reorganised
in October 1953. When the States Reorganisation Commission
report, released in October 1955, rejected the demand for Samyukta
Maharashtra and recommended the formation of a ‘balanced’ bilingual
state with Bombay as its capital, there was a flurry of protests and
many incidents of violence in Bombay.
Maharashtra now became active in asserting its claims. Most of the
leaders called for a unilingual Maharashtra including all Marathi-speaking
areas, while Vidarbha insisted on being a separate state. The
Gujaratis staked their claims to the city of Mumbai and the Congress
high command hesitated to include Mumbai— the financial capital
of India— in a unilingual state. Then, a militant body of opposition
parties with a few dissidents from Congress was formed calling itself
the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti. It demanded a united unilingual
state of Maharashtra including Marathwada, Vidarbha, Karwar,
Belgaum and adjoining areas. It suspected that Congress leaders
were not responsive to their demand, they roused tempers and held
demonstrations in support of their demand.
The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, formed at Poona on 6 February
1956, organised satyagraha and other peaceful forms of agitation
with occasional outbursts of violence. Leaders like S. M. Joshi, S. A.
Dange, N. G. Gore and P. K. Atre fought relentlessly and over a
hundred lives were lost. The bigger bilingual Bombay state was formed
on 1 November 1956. The mood of the people was reflected in
the elections that followed and the Congress suffered a debacle in the
second general elections. Finally, the Congress Working Committee
decided to bifurcate the bilingual Bombay state and Maharashtra
was formed on 1 May 1960. The inclusion of Mumbai and the needs
of Marathwada and Vidarbha however remained thorny issues.
Mumbai was ultimately incorporated into Maharashtra, much to the
displeasure of Gujarat. The Akola Pact and the Nagpur Agreement
were attempts to give Vidarbha some of its dues. An understanding
emerged that political leadership would be rotated among the regions
and that Nagpur would be the second capital of Maharashtra and one
Assembly session would be held every year in that city. However,
the demand for a separate Vidarbha has been raised periodically and
Belgaum, Nipani and Karwar still remain simmering issues in the
politics of the state.
Electoral Politics in Maharashtra
The results of the 1957 election to the Assembly were a jolt to the
Congress. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti won 11 of the 24 seats
in Bombay city and 102 seats in western Maharashtra, excluding the
city of Bombay. Y. B. Chavan, who had earlier favoured the creation
of a unilingual state of Maharashtra, later changed his views. He thus
succeeded in fulfilling the regional aspirations of his people without
antagonising the national leaders. The Congress in Maharashtra
cleverly raised and then accepted the demand of the opposition parties
to have a unilingual state of Maharashtra and thus removed the
very plank on which the opposition parties were agitating.
 In the Assembly elections of 1962, the first since in the new state of
Maharashtra, the Congress under the leadership of Chavan won 215
seats in the state and 21 seats out of 24 in the capital city of Bombay.
The Congress once again re-established itself in the position of
power. V. P. Naik, a leader from Vidarbha, managed to foster
consensusand cooperation among various factions of the party and
enjoyed the longest term as the chief minister from December 1963
to February 1975.
The Emergency and the post-emergency period brought about a
change in the national as well as state-level politics. Indira Gandhi’s
confrontational politics took its toll; elections after the emergency
witnessed a decline in the dominant position of the Congress in
Maharashtra. It was the reflection of what had happened at the centre
and was also the result of politics within the state. The old Congress
could no longer accommodate the new aspirants for power. Though
the elite in the Maratha retained their hold on the rural economy,
internal competitions within the Marathas for power and position
were visible. Indira Gandhi used these internal squabbles and personal
ambitions for her political purpose. In 1978, there was a split in the
Congress on the issue of Indira Gandhi’s leadership and a subsequent
split in the Maratha group. The Congress (Samajwadi) under Sharad
Pawar, a leader who had carved out his position of power by now,
emerged on the political scene. Major opposition political parties came
together in 1978 and supported Sharad Pawar. They put together a
coalition government of the Progressive Democratic Front (PDF),
the first non-Congress government in the state. It however lost to the
Congress party within 18 months. It had failed to organise the landless
labour and other deprived sections of the rural area.
After coming to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi declared fresh
elections in nine states including Maharashtra. After this election,
the Maratha leadership acknowledged Indira Gandhi’s leadership.
In the elections of 1980 and 1985 legislative assembly elections, the
Pawar group showed its strength. It was however obvious that it will
not be possible to look after the interests of the Marathas by being
outside the formal framework of the Congress. Having realised this,
Sharad Pawar re-entered the Congress in 1986 and became the chief
minister in 1988.
There were eight chief ministers in Maharashtra during 1975 and
1988. During this period, the Congress organisation found it difficult
to contain differences within the party. There were other
developments
too. The uneven pace of development stimulated some unrest
in Marathwada in 1974. Around the same time, the new politics of
Dalits also surfaced when there was a demand to name Marathwada
University after Dr Ambedkar. This new politics also raised its voice
against the Maratha leadership. During the 1970s, the Congress had
neglected the interests of the farmers and supported industrialisation
by the capitalists. Industries were developed in the Mumbai–Thane
belt. Naturally the Congress leaders and workers, barring western
Maharashtra, raised their voice against the Congress leadership of the
state. People also felt that the Congress government and leadership
were unable to protect the interests of the rural agriculturists. Now
the anti-Congress feeling became obvious. In the beginning of the
1980s, the Shetkari Sanghatana became active and it exposed the
internal economic tension of the Maratha–Kunbi group. In addition,
the ideological framework of the Congress was inadequate to cope
with the formidable challenge of Hindutva thrown up by the Bhartiya
Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena.
After the 1989 elections, a realignment of political parties surfaced
with the decline in the of the Congress power. Around this time, the
Shiv Sena started spreading its tentacles outside the Mumbai–Thane
belt. Maharashtra experienced emotional and ideological politics in
the 1990s as the BJP–Shiv Sena axis emerged in the elections as a
powerful alternative against the Congress. The Congress felt the need
to take help of other parties, though it retained its hold over the votes
of the Adivasis, Dalit and the Muslims. The bomb blasts in Mumbai,
Hindu–Muslim riots and the corruption scandals had tarnished the
image of the Congress. In 1993, Sharad Pawar took over the charge
from Sudhakar Naik after the riots. However, differences between
the two factions, one under Naik and another under Pawar, came
to the surface. The sizable number of rebels in the Congress coupled
with the advent of Hindutva in politics contributed to Congress’s defeat
in the 1995 elections and the BJP–Shiv Sena combine won.
Pawar’s formation of a new political party, the Nationalist
Congress
Party (NCP), in 1999 started a new chapter in the politics of
Maharashtra. It won 58 seats in the 1999 assembly elections and the
government was formed based on an alliance between the Congress
and the NCP. This alliance rests on pragmatic considerations rather
than ideology. Therefore both the parties had no problem in 2002
fighting elections at the Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti levels
individually and showing good results.
The alliance between these two parties brought victory to them in
the 2004 assembly elections: the NCP got 71 and the Congress got
69 seats. This trend continued in 2009. The assembly elections of 2009,
held after the victory of the Congress at the national level, brought
victory for the ruling alliance of the Congress and the NCP, despite
the incumbency factor, internal factions and differences. In an
assembly of 288, the Congress won 82 seats and the NCP 62. The
alliance, however, did not have a smooth start and the allocation of
the ministries could be settled only after prolonged negotiation.
Palshikar et al. draw attention to the relative stability of vote share
of the four major parties over the last one decade and point out that
Maharashtra’s political scenario displays a curious blend of electoral
stability, limited levels of satisfaction and a lot of social volatility
(Palshikar et al. 2009). Slowly, a bipolar arrangement of two fronts
has emerged in Maharashtra: the Congress–NCP-led Democratic
Front and the BJP–Shiv Sena alliance. The fact that the Congress is
in the saddle both at the centre and the state at present has its own
equations. It has to be noted, however, that factors like currents and
undercurrents at regional and local levels, caste-based identity politics,
role of rebels in all major parties, political bargaining and pulls and
compromises within and between various parties forming alliances
have made Maharashtra politics fluid.
Claim for Regional Identity: The Shiv Sena
Since its formation in 1966, the Shiv Sena has emphasised on the
sons-of-the-soil principle and has struck immediate chord with
the Marathi-speaking people of Mumbai, who feel threatened with
people coming to the city from other regions. From its beginnings, the
party made its impact on local politics by championing the economic
interests of the Maharashtrians whose jobs, it claimed, were being
usurped by the outsiders, particularly south Indians. As a part of the
sons-of-the-soil movement, it has made Maharashtrian-centric
politics
its first priority, followed closely by an anti-Communist stance
and the championing of a patriotism that demonised ‘anti-national’
Muslims. From its inception, the Shiv Sena has had a reputation for
violence. Its attack on the Communist Party office in Parel (Mumbai)
in 1967, its alleged role in the murder of the Communist member of
the Legislative Assembly Krishna Desai, its assaults on south Indian
restaurants and street hawkers, its involvement in the 1971 Bhiwandi
riots and in Belgaum border clashes were all early demonstrations of
the party’s readiness to utilise extreme methods of political action. At
the same time, the party has pursued a populist programme— providing
services in local neighbourhoods and slums and courting the loyalties,
particularly of Marathi-speaking male youth (Katzenstein et al.
1998: 218–19). The Shiv Sena has thrived because of its image as the
saviour of the Marathi people— a Robin Hood figure with some
welfare work— has yielded rich results.
The Shiv Sena started participating in the city elections of Thane
and Mumbai since 1967. After the mid-1970s, the ability of the
Congress to absorb different interest groups declined, dissensions
within the Maratha leadership surfaced, the Janata Party could not
fulfill its promise of a truly democratic government, and the BJP had
its own limitations. There seemed to be a void in the public sphere.
The farmers’ movement (Shetkari Sanghatana) led by Sharad Joshi
and the new party led by Sharad Pawar also did not come up to the
expectations of the people. The grip of the sugar and other cooperatives
under the Maratha leadership loosened. A new politics emerged
in this void where the issues of cultural identity, caste identity and
sharp divisions between the urban and rural areas became pronounced.
The Shiv Sena rushed into this void with emotional appeal for the
people of Maharashtra.
The Shiv Sena expanded in the 1980s and made its presence felt in
the 1990s in the state and at the centre. In the 1990s, the Shiv Sena used
the new card of Hindutva to enhance its importance in politics and
built an alliance with the BJP. It made an emotional appeal to the
Hindus and ambitious unemployed youth. In the elections, many new
faces won on the tickets of the Shiv Sena. It became a curious mix of
various groups ranging from urban to rural, Maratha–Kunbis to Other
Backward Castes (OBCs), and it recruiting from all communities. The
party even had a Muslim in the government which it formed in 1995
in the state. Bal Thackeray remains supreme for the party followers
and his word is the law. His oratory, his wit, his appearance at the
Dussera rallies, his effective histrionics and his ability to communalise
issues attract the crowds. He exercises his choice in all appointments
including that of the chief minister: Manohar Joshi was replaced by
Narayan Rane in 1999. The party’s militancy, preference for action
rather than dialogue, indifference to the established norms of politics
and macho stance of politics have a raw appeal for the people. It has
managed to hold its space in formal politics by taking part in
elections
and non-formal politics by organising groups and taking action
as suited to the situation. There is no ideological framework for the
party; it prefers to survive on locating the ‘other’ and following the
dictates of the supreme leader.
 The journey of the Shiv Sena is fascinating. It received the support
of the Congress in its early years, mainly due to its ability to destroy
the trade union movement in Mumbai. Over the years, it has learnt
to make use of cultural identity, to play the game of power politics
and to adopt a policy according to the circumstances. It supported
the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, tried other avenues and
has finally allied itself with the BJP since 1984 Lok Sabha elections.
Both of them have also been contesting most of the local elections as
partners. Gradually the Shiv Sena has grown outside Mumbai too
while retaining its hold in Mumbai and Konkan. At the assembly-level,
it emerged as the largest opposition to the Congress in 1990 and got
power with the BJP in 1995 and even had its chief minister. It has
adopted an anti-Congress policy and has retained its strident policy
of Hindutva. It has attacked the central government for appeasing the
Muslims on issues such as the Shah Bano case. Its aggressive pro-Hindu
and anti-Muslim stance provides the ideological base which appeals
to the people. Its weekly Marmik and daily Samna have their avowed
readers. The rivalry between the cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray
ultimately led Raj to set up a new party— the Maharashtra Navnirman
Sena (MNS)— in 2006 which follows the same methods and means
adopted by the Shiv Sena. This party made a dent in the Shiv Sena
vote in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, especially in the Mumbai–Thane
belt, benefiting the Congress–NCP alliance. The MNS won 13 seats
in the 2009 assembly elections and it will be interesting to watch the
competitive politics of the cousins.
The Shiv Sena has been able to carve its niche in the politics of
Maharashtra. Taking up the cause of giving the Marathi manoos
(people) priority in the commercial, industrial and public spheres and
emphasising on the Marathi identity, the party evokes the cultural
legacy of Shivaji. According to Suhas Palshikar, ‘It is possible to argue
that the Sena’s appeal hinged on the adroit combination of nativism,
regional identity and a communal construction of nationalism.’
(Palshikar 2006: 263). It changes its cards according to the
situations
— the ‘other’ of its perception keeps on changing from the
south Indian to non-Marathi to the Muslim. Its clever mingling of
the ideological and cultural aspects with politics has yielded rich
dividends. It conveys its ideas and strategies in simple and direct
way and displays its action-oriented stance that attracts the people,
especially the youth. Some instances are: the issue it raised over
playing cricket with the team from Pakistan, opposing ghazal concerts
by artists from Pakistan, its demand for driving away Bangladeshis
as well as north Indians from Mumbai, organising maha-aratis,
(massive congregation offering prayers with religious songs and lamps
to Hindu gods), opposing some passages in Dr Ambedkar’s book
Riddles of Hinduism and opposing the naming of the Marathwada
University at Aurangabad after Dr Ambedkar. Its assumption of
the role of the custodian of culture and protector of order justifies its
ways of extortion and other methods of settling the score outside the
formal sphere of law and politics. Since the 1980s, it has spread its
influence in rural Maharashtra riding on its anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit
agenda. It has obtained support of the Marathas in Marathwada and
the OBCs in Vidarbha and Mumbai to some extent. This however
does not stop the Shiv Sena to offer alliances with the Dalit as Uddhav
Thackrey did in 2003 asking Shiv Shakti (the force of the Sena/Hindu)
and Bhim Shakti (force of Dalits of the Republican Party) to come
together. The call of ‘Mumbai for the people of Mumbai’ now includes
non-Marathi people like Gujaratis also, who have been staying here
for a long time.
At present, the MNS also tries to work on the discontent and
frustration of the Marathi people, just as the Shiv Sena did in the
past. Commenting on the situation, Aroon Tikekar (2008) points out
that neither the leaders of the Shiv Sena nor its followers noticed that
transient success made Marathi Mumbaikars arrogant, insincere,
with no respect for learning, instead aspiring for quick rewards and
searching for short cuts to prosperity. Now the situation has changed.
The younger generation of the Marathis, having tasted the success and
rewards of money power, is trying to find its own dreamland. The
aggressive posture of the Shiv Sena no longer attracts it and it shuns
the politics of violence. The growing middle class is convinced that in
the long run, only merit pays and hard work benefits.
The Role of the Marathas
The Maratha–Kunbis form the dominant and largest single caste group
of population in Maharashtra and are found in almost all regions
of the state. No other state has such a large caste group with social,
political and economic advantages combined together. Their presence
in the Legislative Assemblies has been impressive. The number of
the Maratha members in the 10 assemblies since the formation of the
state has been between 125 to 140— 45 per cent of the total number
of legislators (Vora 2007: 66). There have been many leaders from
this group such as Sharad Pawar, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the father-son
duo of Shankarrao and Ashok Chavan and R. R. Patil.
This group, consisting of almost 31 per cent of the population, has
dominated the political scene in Maharashtra for decades. Though
often perceived as homogeneous, it is a socially and economically
stratified group. Its members have enhanced their interests by the
politics of ‘development, cooperation and local government’ and
supporting
the Congress, especially in the initial decades. The relationship
between the Maratha dominance and the sugar cooperatives, in this
context, is important. Sugar cooperatives have helped the economy of
the rural areas in western Maharashtra. However, the same cannot be
said for other parts of Maharashtra that have followed suit. The politics
of sugar cooperatives is interwoven with economy, caste politics and
wielding of political power. Sugar cooperatives are now making way
for other centres of power like educational institutions and influential
political players have entered this new sphere. Among the Marathas
also, there are rich land holding farmers and poor farmers. Balancing
their interests in times of globalisation and liberalisation is an
importantissue. The political scene is changing and the Maratha–Kunbi
is no longer the main base for the Congress and the NCP, as the
BJP–Shiv Sena politics has made a dent here.
The internal discrepancies and discord within the Marathas have
come to surface with the changes in the social and economic situation.
The decline in agriculture with growing urbanisation has triggered
economic changes that influence politics too. Since privatisation that
started in the 1990s, only those farmers who could compete have tended
to gain. However, aspirations of the lower and middle level farmers
have not been fulfilled. Discontent at local level took form of
movements
and resulted in some political upheaval. The Mandal politics has
created disturbances among the Marathas and has raised important
questions regarding the preservation of the entity of the Maratha–
Kunbi group and the issue of reservation for the Kunbi–Marathas as
available to the OBCs. As pointed out by Rajeshwari Deshpande, the
Marathas face a dilemma under the changing political circumstances.
Weakening of their control over the formal centres of power compels
them to go along with the backward castes. Yet their self-image as
rulers prevents them to openly accept backward status. The arrival of
a caste called Kunbi–Maratha serves a dual purpose. The Marathas
get an easy access to the reservation available to the backward castes,
if they wish. At the same time, their status and glory as a ruling caste
gets protected in the process. In that sense, not only the state but the
dominant caste also manipulates the reservation discourse in a neat
manner (Deshpande 2004: 1449). The issue of reservation within
the Marathas is causing political tensions.
Politics of the Dalits
Movements like the Satyashodhak Samaj and ideas of Phule and
Ambedkar have strengthened the anti-caste discourse and struggle.
The concept of Bahujan Samaj to accommodate the non-Brahmin
communities was also accepted in Maharashtra. The sad fact
however
remains that in spite of the reservations and some silver lines,
these disadvantaged groups have not received their due from the
process of development and democracy (The Scheduled Tribes or STs
account for 8.9 per cent and the Scheduled Castes 10.20 per cent of
the population of Maharashtra). There are, however, some leaders
who have reached high positions: Sushil Kumar Shinde of the Congress
became the chief minister in 2003.
Participation of the Dalits in the movement for the formation of
linguistic state of Maharashtra brought them in the political process
and political expediency pushed them to ally with the Congress.
Some factions of the Republican Party of India has always been with
the Congress while some have been with political parties other than
the Congress. The SCs have experienced a new awakening under the
leadership of Dr Ambedkar. The MA-DHA-V factor (Mali, Dhanagar,
Vanjari combine) is important in this context. The Malis today are a
fairly wealthy and educated community who have in due course of
time changed from being gardeners to contractors, and so did the Telis
and Koshtis of Vidarbha.
The Dalit youth got involved in the Dalit Panther movement of
the 1970s that brought them near to the socialist and communist
parties. But their hopes for a broad and radical agenda were shattered
with a split. The movement however prepared them to fight against
the established social norms. They clashed with the Shiv Sena in early
1970s, though in recent times, they have not hesitated to make some
political compromises. The Dalits are fragmented, there are many
intra-Dalit caste differences. The Mahars, who largely converted to
Budhhism, are perceived as more advanced than the Charmakar and
Matang. This generates its own dynamics. There is an undercurrent of
schism within the Dalit community as a whole, which not only impedes
its unified political action but also provides spaces for Hindutva to
intervene in Dalit politics. Unfortunately, the Dalits have not been able
to build one united political organisation, and therefore their impact
on politics has been limited. Their politics, however, is visible in cities
like Mumbai, Nagpur and Aurangabad. The three main Dalit political
factions, led by Athavale, Gavai and Prakash Ambedkar, play their
games in elections, while the electoral politics have enabled the BJP
and the Shiv Sena to get seats reserved for the SC in the assembly in
mid-1990s. The democratic transformation visualised by Ambedkar
has been lost sight of. Compromises are made by the leadership and the
ordinary Dalits remain on the margin of power. When such workers
look at the Mayawati experiment of Uttar Pradesh, the logic of power
defies all other considerations. Ambedkar is made into an icon rather
than a beacon (Palshikar 2005: 208–23).
Power game pushes some leaders from the Dalit communities to
prominence. Such power positions, however, hardly translate into
development for the community. It is interesting to note that an
important Dalit poet and leader like Namdeo Dhasal chose to align
with the Shiv Sena. The OBC politics also has its own currents and
undercurrents at all levels: every party has a strong OBC lobby.
The 2009 Assembly elections witnessed the efforts of Ramdas
Athavale (Republican Party of India) to bring various Republican
factions together and to form a third front named Republican Left
Democratic Samiti, consisting of some small parties— mainly the
Communist parties, the Peasants and Workers Party, the Janata Dal
(Secular), the Samajwadi Party and some Republican Party factions.
This initiative, however, resulted in their winning just 12 seats. It is
important to note that persistent efforts by the Bahujan Samaj Party
to make an entry in to the state assembly did not yield any result, and
it could not win any seat when it contested 281 seats.
Issues of Vidarbha and Marathwada
Vidarbha politics has been different from other parts of Maharashtra.
The area is backward, social structure is different, the Maratha
leadership
is not strong and there are many groups. The issue of separate
Vidarbha is still alive and within the Congress too, this issue has
remained important. There have been such demands also from some
persons in the Shiv Sena belonging to the Vidarbha region, though
the party is opposed to it. The issue comes up in different places in
different contexts.
 To calm the fears of the people of Vidarbha region, the Constitution
of India was amended in November 1956 and the President was
empowered to bestow on the Governor of the state the responsibility
to appoint statutory development boards for Vidarbha, Marathwada
and rest of Maharashtra. Dissatisfaction with regional inequality led
to the appointment of a Fact Finding Committee chaired by Prof.
V. M. Dandekar in 1984.
The publication of the Report awoke the backward regions to
the constitutional provisions for the appointment of the statutory
regional development boards. Dissatisfaction over the tardy
implementation
of the planned removal of the backlog simmered for a decade
and led to the appointment of the Indicators and Backlog Committee
in 1995 to find out if the backlog had increased between 1984 and 1994.
It was found that while intra-regional disparity was reduced in the rest
of Maharashtra, it had widened in Vidarbha and Marathwada.
The issue is not free from political undercurrents. Very often, the state
makes an announcement of a development scheme for one region and
soon has to follow up with similar schemes for other regions without
making detailed provision for funds or making sure that the particular
scheme is suitable for the region concerned. The announcement of a
special development programme for Vidarbha in 1996 inevitably led to
the announcement of similar schemes for Marathwada, Konkan and
other regions. There is electoral politics also. The number of members
elected to the legislative assembly from Vidarbha is sizeable, and often
they have helped the party in the number game.
Marathwada is even more backward than Vidarbha. The Marathas
are strong here and its local leadership is with the Congress. The
Marathwada Congress raises its voice against the dominance of
established leadership of the Marathas in western Maharashtra.
Shankar Rao Chavan and Shivajirao Nilangekar Patil became chief
ministers but could not get full support of the people. The initial period
of the Congress political framework helped in the establishment of
some sugar factories in Marathwada. But the strong institutional
support of the cooperatives like that of western Maharashtra could
not be established here. Politics based on patronage and the dominant
feudal ideology has led to frequent clashes between the Dalits and high
caste persons at regular intervals. Atrocities on the Dalits, like the
one that erupted on the issue of change of name of the Marathwada
University after Dr Ambedkar, are alarming.
Conclusion
The glitter of the promise of a strong and unified Maharashtra on the
basis of a language has faded. Marathi is the official language of the
state. However, language has not proved to be a strong thread binding
people to a common destiny. Over the years, electoral politics and
economicforces have played a major role in moulding the destiny of the
state and the caste politics has emerged as a powerful force. Convenient
alliances and deals create competitions at many levels, making the
electoral battles far more complex. The sad reality of contemporary
politics is that rivalries among leaders, personal ambitions, hold of
some families on power, factional politics, infighting, corruption,
scandals and decline in ideology and moral standards have afflicted
all political parties of Maharashtra. In addition, the state faces grave
issues of suicides of poor farmers and Naxalite violence.
The promises and ways of working of political parties from the
so-called progressive to conservative have started resembling each
other. Perspectives and policies also do not have much different to
offer as was evident from the Enron issue. Challenges before the parties
are: providing visionary leadership, chalking out and implementing
viable and solid programmes for economic progress and social
justice,
building disciplined structure, managing the relations among
leaders from local to national levels and coping with the dominance
of caste, family and money. Making politics a profession of power
has encouraged members of parties to change their loyalties. Since
the late 1990s, rebels have made their presence felt in all the political
parties— Anna Dange left the BJP and Raj Thackaray left the
Shiv Sena. The father and son duo of Balasaheb and Radhakrishna
Vikhe-Patil left the Congress for Shiv Sena, only to re-enter it later.
Narayan Rane left the Shiv Sena, joined the Congress, and again left
the latter only to rejoin it later. Such rebels create ripples in both the
parties— the party from where they defect as well as the party to
which they go.
Parties attempt to establish power in different regions and power
equations differ depending on the economy, presence of dominant
castes and leadership. The political situation encourages alliances of
all kinds and parties like to leave their options open. The Congress
and the NCP alliance is that of convenience. The BJP, after the demise
of Pramod Mahajan, is not strong and its alliance with the Shiv Sena
is not very smooth. It will be interesting to watch the changes on the
political scene of Maharashtra.
 The issue of border dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka
comes up in different contexts. It surfaces at literary forums also. An
eminent scholar of Maharashtra Y. D. Phadke, as the President of the
Marathi Sahitya Sammelan held at Belgaum in 2000, raised the issue of
merger of Belgaum, Karwar and Nipani (at present in Karnataka), in
Maharashtra. The Shiv Sena had objected in 2004 to the appointment
of the former Karnataka Chief Minister S. M. Krishna as Governor
of Maharashtra.
Growing incidents of intolerance in the civil society indicate its
fragile fabric. Sambhaji Brigade vandalised the Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute, Pune, in 2004 because Prof. James Laine had
done research here for his controversial book on Shivaji. Writers
and journalists are often attacked and threatened for expressing their
views freely, if there are not in conformity with the regional ethos.
The passages in the textbooks also come under scrutiny to findout
whether they hurt the regional feelings. The tirade in the name of
Marathi manoos is disturbing. Demand of reservation of jobs for local
youth is no longer the prerogative of any particular political party.
Such populism causes concern as it goes against the progressive
ideas entrenched in Maharashtra. Added to this is the discontent
among people against the decline in political culture. The Muslims, in
particular, feel agitated at lack of action vis-à-vis the recommendations
of the Srikrishna Commission.
The goal of the development gets entangled in the political cobweb
and its pace becomes uneven with only some urban centres prospering.
Despite the effort to disperse industry to backward regions, most of
it remained on the periphery of Mumbai and Pune. Some industrial
development did occur in Marathwada and Vidarbha. However, even
there, the industry has remained mostly within their prime cities and
at the most on their fringes (Maharashtra State Development Report
2007: 304). Despite a glorious past and a prosperous present, the
state has a quarter of its population below the poverty line (ibid.:
165). Maharashtra’s prosperity is concentrated in Mumbai and other
industrial and commercial cities like Thane, Pune, Nagpur and
Nashik, while her villages, where the majority of her disadvantaged
communities live, have no share in the prosperity and they eke
out a living on the fringes (ibid.: 166). The development in 35
districts
has also been much dispersed. Districts like Dhule, Jalna and
Buldhana are very poor, while districts such as Nashik, Kolhapur,
Pune, Nagpur, Thane and Mumbai are rich. Within each region
also, a substantial divergence exists (Human Development Report
Maharashtra 2002: 40–41.)
 Localisation of politics has assumed crucial importance. As pointed
out by Suhas Palshikar, state politics is becoming the sum total of
many and often unrelated political situations at the district level.
Political competition is only for local issues; political economy is seen
and understood as only a local phenomenon. There is no capacity in
this kind of politics to relate to broader issues concerning the state
(Palshikar 2004: 4400).
The vision of a strong unified Maharashtra suffers not only from
political maneuverings but also from administrative inefficiency.
The Maharashtra Government Administrative Reforms Committee
Report (2002) brings to the fore the public perception of the
government,
which is characterised by the four Ds— Discourtesy, Delay,
Dishonesty and Deficiency (Maharashtra State Development Report
2007: 219). Unfortunately, the evil of corruption has also crept in.
As ideals are replaced by selfish interests, money and muscle powers
are exhibited in their worst form. G. V. G. Krishnamurthy, the
former Election Commissioner, revealed that there are at least 110
organised criminal gangs in Maharashtra, of whom no less than 55
are in Mumbai. The concentration of criminal gangs in Mumbai is
not a reflection solely of the city’s wealth, but also of the close links
that they have forged with the dominant political parties in the city
(Prem Shankar Jha 2002, quoted in Maharashtra State Development
Report 2007: 224). The norms of cultural diversity and tolerance are
being fast forgotten, as incidents of enforcing the dress code or sign
boards in Marathi or organising demonstrations for jobs for the youth
of Maharashtra indicate.
It is convenient to pay tribute to all those who dreamt of a
progressive
and strong Maharashtra based on the linguistic principle.
However, in practice, economic forces, caste equations, political
manipulation and electoral power games have taken over the ideals
expressed at the time of the formation of Maharashtra. There are,
however, some pockets of clean administration or good development
work or people’s participation at local level.

Note
* We thank Dr Aroon Tikekar for his insightful comments on the draft.
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Maharashtra.
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Shiv Sena in Maharashtra: The Symbiosis of Discursive and Institutional
Power’, in Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli (eds), Community Conflicts and the
State in India, pp. 215–38. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Lele, Jayant. 1995. ‘Saffronisation of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of
City, State and Nation’, in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds), Bombay:
Metaphor for Modern India, pp. 185–212. Mumbai: Oxford University Press.
Maharashtra State Development Report, 2007, Planning Commission, Government
of India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Palshikar, Suhas. 2004. ‘Issues in an Issue-less Election: Assembly Polls in
Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly , 39 (40): 4399–4403.
———. 2005. ‘Maharashtra: Dalit Politics in the Hindutva Trap’, in Anand
Teltumbde (ed.), Hindutva and Dalits: Perspectives for Understanding
Communal Praxis , pp. 208–223. Kolkata: Samya.
———. 2006. ‘Shiv Sena: A Tiger With Many Faces?’, in Peter Ronald deSouza
and E. Sridharan (eds), India’s Political Parties, pp. 253–80. New Delhi.
Sage Publications.
Palshikar, Suhas and Suhas Kulkarni. eds. 2007. Maharashtratil Sattasangharsha:
Rajakiya Pakshanchi Vatchal (Power Struggle in Maharashtra: The Journey
of the Political Parties). Pune: Samakalin Prakashan.
Palshikar, Suhas, Rajeshwari Deshpande and Nitin Birmal. 2009. ‘Maharashtra
Polls: Continuity amidst Social Volatility’, Economic and Political Weekly ,
44 (48): 42–47.
Phadke, Y. D. 1979. Politics and Language. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing
House.
Thakkar, Usha and Mangesh Kulkarni. 1995. Politics in Maharashtra. Bombay:
Himalaya Publishing House.
Tikekar, Aroon. 2008. ‘No Identity Crisis’, DNA, 9 February 2008, Mumbai.
Vora, Rajendra. ‘Marathavarchasva’ (Maratha Dominance), in Suhas Palshikar
and Nitin Birmal (eds), Maharashtrache Rajkaran: Rajakiya Prakriyeche
Sthanik Sandarbha (Politics of Maharashtra: Local Context of Political
Process), 2nd edn, pp. 65–83. Pune: Pratima Prakashan.
 7
Discourses on Telangana and Critique
of the Linguistic Nationality Principle
K. Srinivasulu

Andhra Pradesh occupies an important place in the history of states’

reorganisation for it has seen two opposite tendencies: while it has seen
a demand for ‘Vishalandhra’, a unified linguistic state of the Telugus,
it has also seen from the beginning a resistance to such a demand from
Telangana which resulted in popular mobilisation in the 1950s, 1960s
and since the 1990s.
If the ‘Vishalandhra’ demand has been politically articulated by
the Communist Left and theoretically informed by the concept of
linguistic nationality, then the demand for statehood to Telangana,
apparently governed by pragmatic concerns of the political leadership,
has displayed sensitivity to the historical specificity of the region and
sought to articulate the problematic of regional uneven development
(between Telangana and Andhra regions) in its multidimensionality.1
Though there is no serious attempt to critique the linguistic nationality 2
principle in the Indian context, the discourses generated as part of the
Telangana state movement promise to present an alternative
perspective
on the question of regional autonomy and identity. This may help
us to critically reflect on the last 50 years of our federal experience and
help us to rethink the future of states’ reorganisation.
This chapter seeks to address the above issue by foregrounding the
theoretical assumptions and perspectives implicit in the two opposite
positions on the question of Telangana and examine the larger
implications
of these positions for the growing demand for a second phase
for states’ reorganisation in India.
This chapter is organised in four sections. In the first section, the
concept of nationality is examined in terms of two models that could
be explicated from the historical development of national formations.
It seeks to highlight how, in the context of belated and especially
colonial societies like India, the nationality formations differ from
the classical formations and pose problems of both conceptual and
political nature.
 Discourses on Telanganam

In section two, an attempt is made to contextualise the Telangana

issue in its historical background to see how its trajectory of social,
political and economic development is different from the Andhra
region so that the persistence of the Telangana demand could be
appreciated.
Section three discusses the different phases in the history of the
movement
for the Telangana statehood and engages with the discourses
on Telangana movement that: (a) reflect the depth and expanse of
the popular engagement with the issue and (b) shows the serious
limitations of the linguistic determinism in the shaping of democratic
political and regional identities.
The last section sums up the argument by highlighting the need
for rethinking the nationality question as the framework for the reorganisation
of states in India and need to negotiate with the powerful
regional identities that are shaped by the deeper historical and cultural
processes and which are generally glossed over in the adherence to
the linguistic principle.
I
The history of nationalism is closely related to the emergence and
development of capitalism. In western Europe, nation–states were
products of capitalism. It was in relation to the process of growth
and expansion of the bourgeoisie here that market as a mechanism of
economic transactions and modern nation–state as a political entity
have evolved and stabilised. The classical bourgeois revolutions were
largely successful in striking a balance between the national market,
community and the state. As a result, more or less unproblematic
nation–states emerged in western Europe.
Historically the path of development of capitalism and of nation–states
has been quite varied. In spite of the complexity and multiplicity
of variations, in a broad theoretical sense, two distinct models of
development of nationalism can be identified: namely, the ‘classical’
and ‘belated’ models.3
In the classical model of capitalist development, the ascendant
bourgeoisie, by occupying pre-eminent position in the world of
production,
came to direct the state. Here it is necessary to make an analytical
distinction between civil society and state. Civil society consists of
the ensemble of social institutions that are non-political; state, on the
contrary, refers to the bureaucratic–institutional structure, through
which political power relations are organised. In the classical model,
the capitalist class organised its hegemony in the civil society, largely
 m K. Srinivasulu

independently of the state intervention. The process of creation and

development of hegemony could bring about a symmetry between
different instances of social totality, i.e., between economy, society
and culture.
Therefore, in the classical path, it is the capitalist class that organised
its hold over the modern market, its hegemony on the society and
permeated its values and world-view through a common language in
the political spatial unit of nation–state. Thus the bourgeoisie embodied
in itself the ‘national spirit’ as a corollary to the objective process
of capital accumulation. The formation of nation–state in western
Europe can thus be described as the ‘classical path’ of development of
nationalism. Based on this experience, a nationality can be defined as
a historically evolved community formed on the basis of a common
language and cultural identity within a territorial boundary for a stable
market and organised political power.
Critical to the formation of a nationality is the consciousness of
community which, following Benedict Anderson, can be called a sense
of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983). According to Anderson,
nation defined as an imagined community becomes a historical reality
with the gradual dissolution of the old face-to-face groups because ‘the
members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds
of each lives the image of their communion’ (ibid.: 15). The act of
imagining is crucial for the national formations and the question of
whether it is forged through genuineness or falsity becomes secondary
to the means, mode and ‘the style in which they are imagined’
(ibid.: 15). This imagination is the basis on which ‘a new way of linking
fraternity, power and time meaningfully together’ (ibid.: 40).
The means through which this is achieved are provided by the
emergence of ‘print capitalism’ which created a unique and an
‘explosive interaction between a system of production and productive
relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and
the fatality of human linguistic diversity’ (ibid.: 46). Print capitalism
created the possibility of a vast market and ‘unified fields of exchange
and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars’
(ibid.: 47). Anderson further observes that print capitalism ‘gave a
new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that
image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation’
(ibid.). Its role in creating ‘languages of power’, with certain dialects
playing a dominant part in communication through printing, is being
emphasised. It is the possibility created by print capitalism of ‘growing
number of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves
to others, in profoundly new ways’ (Anderson 1983: 40). so that
they can imagine themselves as a community that forms the basis of
crystallisation of nationality identity.
Such an élan is absent in the case of belated capitalism. Any way,
such a process of formation of nationality is rather slow and uneven
in these countries, especially in the context of the colonialism. The
relative structural weakness of the bourgeoisie here rendered it
inadequate to accomplish a thoroughgoing social transformation. As
a result, the economy remained unevenly developed with the classes of
earlier modes of production still remaining dominant. This is evident
in its lack of initiative and leadership in the civil society. Because of its
organic weakness in the civil society consequent upon its weak
structural
position in the economy, the class failed to organise the culture
of the entire society on bourgeois hegemony and left the cultural space
to pre-capitalist ideologies, making it composite without a principal
organising principle.
With the access to modern education limited to a miniscule urban
middle class and rural landed classes, the gulf between the literate and
non-literate population remained quite huge with the latter
constituting
the majority. As a result, the reach of the benefits of print
capitalism
was also limited to the minority literate classes and therefore
restricted the social, political and cultural communication across social
classes. This has an inhibiting impact on the cultural transactions
between the literate and the vernacular cultures with serious implications
for the hegemonic process. The failure on this side leaves the civil
society relatively weak vis-à-vis the state.
The weak structural position of the bourgeoisie in the social
production,
and consequent upon it, its organic weakness in the organisation
of consent and hegemony in civil society had its impact on
the nationality formation. Thus the uneven expansion of capital, and
development of economic production and culture is corresponded by
an unevenly developed nationalities. The nationality question in India
has to be understood against this theoretical background.
To appreciate the nationality articulation in the multinationality
context of India, it is necessary to note two distinct political realities
in India which existed on the eve of independence: one, the British-ruled
provinces and two, the native princely states. These two regions
displayed vastly divergent pictures in terms of historical
experiences,
economic development, cultural articulation and political
movements.
While the former, which was exposed to colonial modernity,
could experience certain degree of agricultural and industrial
development,
expansion in education and employment, modern
institutional
structures of governance and middle class elaboration, the
princely India lagged behind in all these aspects. Nationality, defined
as an imagined community, is a product of modernity. Therefore in
terms of development of nationalist imagination, these regions show
variations.
The nationality question in India, historically, has to be located in
the context of national movement. Indian nationalism can be best
describedas an incomplete revolution, as all the theoretical assumptions
stated in the earlier paragraph can be found here. The bourgeoisie
in colonial India did not develop in an independent manner. On
the contrary, its development was conditioned by the logic of semifeudalism
and colonialism/imperialism. The capitalist development
in India was structurally dependent on the requirements of the
metropolis. In spite of this generalisation, which is applicable to all
colonial countries, India had certain unique features that distinguished
it from other colonies.
India was a fairly developed colony. In spite of the structural
dependence, the native bourgeoisie came to acquire a certain degree of
autonomy from the metropolis, especially in the twentieth century.
The most significant factor was of course the inherent contradiction in
the world capitalism itself, which culminated in the intra-imperialist
wars. However, the question of autonomy cannot be overemphasised:
the saga of nationalist struggle itself testifies to the limitations of the
Indian bourgeoisie. The consequence of the organic weakness of
Indian bourgeoisie is objectively reflected in the fact that capitalism
never developed in a full-fledged fashion. A large section of the
economy, i.e., agriculture was largely left untouched and wherever it
was effected, the impact was partial, i.e., modernisation of agriculture
without corresponding structural transformation of agrarian social
relations. The development of capitalism in India was highly uneven
in terms of spatiality and transformative potential. In the politico-cultural
domain, the nationalist movement failed to bring about any
deep ideological transformation. The uncritical and predominant
use of Hindu dharmic and caste ideologies, and Gandhian moralism
in the nationalist discourse, illustrates the incomplete character of
bourgeois hegemony.
In the context of the nationality question, the Indian National
Congress— the dominant organisation of Indian nationalist movement
—recognised the importance of language as the basis of organisation
of states.4 However, it failed to articulate and incorporate the various
linguistic nationalities into the nationalist movement. The highly
developed nationalities in colonial India that played a significant
role in the nationalist struggle were Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu,
Punjabi, etc.5 By virtue of having been under the British rule early on
and having been centres of British colonial power, these provinces
had come under the impact of British economic policies. Thus, these
provinces experienced early modernisation and liberal education and
as a consequence, they were the first to witness the rise of trading and
industrial bourgeoisie and educated middle classes in the regional
contexts.6 It is these classes which played a crucial role in the social
and political modernisation, and formation of linguistic regional
identities.
On the eve of independence, the nationality scenario in India was
quite uneven. Three phases of development can be identified after
independence which was predominantly determined by the logic of
uneven development and expansion of capitalist relations. They are:
(a) the Nehru era (1947–1967); (b) the pre-Emergency period
(1967–1977); and (c) the post-Emergency period (after 1977).
The Nehruvian period is generally designated as the nation-building
phase. The euphoria and celebration of independence did not last long
and started waning within less than a decade. The contradictions that
were inherited as part of the colonial legacy became manifest in the
form of violent nationality struggles in the north-east. The different
tribal nationality formations (like Nagas and Mizos) that were never
properly influenced by, let alone integrated into the nationalist struggle,
felt their inclusion in India as a violation of their aspiration to
freedom.
The story of secessionist insurgency in these pockets and Indian
state’s suppression of it is well known (Samuel 1993).
The second phase saw the rise of sub-regional and nativist
movements
which were either the consequence of the factional fights within
the Congress or activities of the regional formations. In spite of their
varied manifestations, ideological differences and opportunistic
politics they were structurally related to the ‘internal colonisation’
and marginalisation of the people of the less developed regions,
which was a consequence of uneven development. Most of these
movements were articulated and led by the elite of dominant caste/classes
of these regions.
Again in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a surge of regional
autonomy movements demanding rearrangement of the centre–state
relations. Though these movements were constitutional, the response
of the centre towards these struggles was disturbingly negative. Thus,
when ‘pushed to a corner’, as it were, some of these movements
assumed forms of armed secession, as in the case of Punjab. Each of
these nationality struggles deserve concrete analysis of its historical
evolution in its mediation with the specific class–caste structure and
power relations.
This chapter examines the case of Telangana which goes beyond the
framework of linguistic nationality as the basis of states’ formation and
provides an opportunity to explore alternative frameworks of regional
autonomy and state reorganisation.
II
The Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh, which was formed in
1956 on linguistic basis, comprises three regions— Telangana, coastal
Andhra and Rayalaseema. These three regions present different
historical
backgrounds: while the Telangana region was part of the erstwhile
Nizam’s Hyderabad state, the latter two regions formed part of the
British-governed Madras Presidency. This historical background is
crucial to the understanding of the political economy of development
and the trajectory of social and political processes in these regions.
These historical differences are also important for they continue to
inform the socio-political processes in the state— the articulation
of social forces, caste–class dynamics and the nature and patterns of
social mobilisation.
The composite Hyderabad State comprised eight Telugu-speaking
Telangana districts, three Kannada and five Marathi-speaking districts.
Given the historical specificity of the Nizam’s dominion, the nature
of socioeconomic change and political trajectory in Telangana differs
from that of the British-governed Andhra. A class of landed gentry
consisting of Muslim jagirdars and Hindu deshmukhs belonging to
the Reddy, Velama and Brahmin castes, constituted the support base
of the Nizam’s rule. The Hyderabad state displayed characteristics of
a medieval feudatory and lagged far behind the Madras Presidency
in terms of exposure to modernity. The access to modern education
was very restricted and thus the development of the middle class was
very limited.7
In sharp contrast to the Presidency areas, the Nizam bestowed the
citizens with hardly any civil and political rights. The landed gentry
too inflicted suffering on the rural population through the extraction
of free goods and services (known as vetti), the forced eviction of
tenants (bedaakal) and much more significantly, the denial of dignity
and self-respect.
The Andhra Maha Sabha (AMS) had been in the forefront of
democratic
struggles since the early decades of the twentieth century.
Though the Telugu-speaking people constituted the majority, Telugu
language and literature suffered neglect because of the official policy
of the Nizam’s State that encouraged the Urdu language. Further,
the educated middle class of Telangana region found themselves
marginalised and neglected in a social and cultural scenario that was
dominated by the influential Marathi elite apart from the dominant
Muslim elite. It is this sense of neglect and humiliation suffered by the
Telugu-educated elite in the Hyderabad state that forms the context
of the cultural articulation8 and which was subsequently turned into
a political movement by the AMS as its organisational expression. In
the beginning, it was dominated by pro-Congress elements. However
by the 1930s, it assumed a radical image under the leadership of
communists who took up issues such as the abolition of vetti, protection
to tenants and the demand of ‘land-to-the tiller’.
The anti-Nizam and anti-feudal peasant struggle, led by the
communiststhrough the AMS in the 1940s, is an important fact crucial to
the understanding of political articulation in the subsequent period.
The strategic presence of the communists in the Telangana political
scenario, relevant to note in the context of the present discussion,
formed the political basis of the ‘Vishalandhra’ demand.
The coastal Andhra region is far more developed than the other two
regions of Rayalaseema and Telangana.9 Crucial to the development
of this region, and to the districts of Guntur, Krishna, East and West
Godavari in particular, were the irrigation projects constructed on
the Krishna and Godavari rivers in the mid-nineteenth century by
the British colonial state. With a view to augmenting its revenue from
agriculture, an extensive area was brought under cultivation. This paved
the way for the commercialisation of agriculture and the generation
and accumulation of agrarian surplus (Rao 1985). The impact of
this could be witnessed in the growth of urbanisation in this region
which led to the emergence of centres of commerce, education,
culture and social reform. The growth of towns such as Kakinada,
Rajamundry, Guntur, etc., in the coastal region has to be seen against
this backdrop.
A significant aspect of rural transformation that has occurred since
the late nineteenth century is the differentiation of peasant society
and the emergence of an enterprising agrarian stratagem belonging
predominantly to the Kamma, followed by the Reddy and to a lesser
extent to the Kapu communities. The educated elites of these peasant
castes were catalytic in the emergence of caste-specific movements in
coastal Andhra. They also played a leading role in the kisan (peasant)
movement and the anti-zamindari struggles by rallying the lower
strata of the agrarian society. Because of these struggles, which led to
the abolition of the zamindari system and the tenancy reforms after
independence by the post-colonial state, the ryots and tenants belonging
to these peasant castes gained access to most of the fertile lands.
What is sociologically significant about this trajectory of change,
and of immediate relevance to our analysis, is the polarisation of this
class along caste lines across mass organisations, political parties or
factions therein. While the Reddys joined the ranks of the Congress
Party and waged struggles against Brahmin leadership, the Kammas
gravitated to the Communist Party of India (CPI) and rose to positions
of leadership (Harisson 1956). If the literary and cultural development
in the prosperous Andhra districts since the middle of nineteenth
century contributed to the emergence of regional linguistic identity,
then it was the social and political elite, cutting across the political
differences, which articulated the demand for a separate political
identity for the Telugus in the Tamil-dominant Madras Presidency.10
It was only in 1953, following an agitation for separate statehood,
that the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions were formed into
a separate state of Andhra, with Kurnool as its capital.
The political elite of Andhra region, both belonging to the Congress
and the Communist party, had been quite vocal in their articulation
of the Vishalandhra demand. While the understanding of the Left is
informed by the thesis that linguistic nationality would form the
rationalbasis for the reorganisation of the states, the Congress elite of
Andhra region, not known for such theoretical or historical
sophistication,
were concerned with practical problems like finding a capital,
solving
the budgetary deficit through merging of Andhra and Telangana.
The argument of linguistic state was seen to be coming in handy
(Jayashankar 2004).
In 1956, the state of Andhra Pradesh was formed, despite the
recommendations
to the contrary by the States Reorganisation Commission
(SRC), headed by Justice Fazal Ali. The SRC recommendation that
the two regions should be formed as separate states was made on the
basis of the different historical experiences and uneven development
of the regions. It was opined that the merger of backward Telangana
with advanced Andhra may eventually lead to discord and demand
for separation. In other words, the linguistic premise on the basis of
which a unified state was demanded was found to be insufficient for
the formation of the Telugu state by the SRC.11
What is noteworthy is the observation of the Commission on the
deeper distrust that forms the basis of the opposition to the Vishalandhra.
The Commission opined that the opposition emanates from:
the apprehension felt by the educationally backward people of Telangana
that they may be swamped and exploited by the more advanced people
of coastal area .... The real fear of the people of Telangana is that if
they join Andhra they will be unequally placed in relation to the people
of Andhra and in this partnership the major partner will derive all the
advantages immediately, while ‘Telangana itself may be converted into
a colony by the enterprising coastal Andhra’ (Government of India
1955: p. 105, emphasis added).

In tune with this perception, it thus recommended:

it will be in the interests of Andhra as well as Telangana if, for the
present,
the Telangana area is constituted into a separate State, which may
be known as the Hyderabad State, with provision for its unification with
Andhra after the general elections likely to be held in or about 1961, if
by two-thirds majority the legislature of the residuary Hyderabad State
expresses itself in favour of such unification (ibid.: p. 107).

This recommendation was set aside by the national leadership of the

Congress at the behest of the coastal Andhra leadership as they
persuaded
the former by using their long-term and strong association with
them.12 What added to this move is the politico-ideological demand of
the Left for a unified state on the basis of language. The support for the
Vishalandhra demand came from the Left in Telangana region as well.
As a result, the support for Telangana state was virtually reduced to a
minority with only a section of the Congress leaders backing it.
III
The difference in the historical background and developmental
trajectories between backward Telangana and rich coastal Andhra
in the state is a fact that is not merely of historical importance but also
continues to inform the contemporary political processes. Broadly,
three phases could be identified in the articulation of the tensions
inherent in the regional unevenness. The first phase happened in
the form of resistance to the formation of Andhra Pradesh state in
1956. The second phase was the year-long movement for Telangana
statehood in the late 1960s which was followed by a similar demand in
Andhra and Rayalaseema regions in the early 1970s. The third phase
is the present articulation of the demand which could be traced to the
late 1990s.
In the first phase, the resistance to the merger of Telangana with
coastal Andhra was largely limited to the educated class and a section
of the Congress party. They were apprehensive that the advanced
Andhraits would corner most of the opportunities in education,
employment and politics, thereby depriving the Telanganaits of their
due share. This opinion was expressed through an agitation against
non-mulkhis (non-locals) in the early 1950s.
A dominant section of the Telangana Congress leadership and
socialists, who were a significant force in Telangana till 1960s and who
shared this apprehension, opposed the merger. However, the pressure
of the Andhra Congress leadership, supported by the Communists,
was so overwhelming that the Congress High Command, despite the
recommendation of the SRC and open stand of leaders like Jawaharlal
Nehru against the unified Telugu state,13 had to take a decision in
favour of the formation of the Andhra Pradesh state. In response to this,
the objections raised by the Telanganaits were so strong and persuasive
that they had to be taken cognisance of by the Congress leadership. The
result of this was the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ between the Congress
leaders of Telangana and Andhra to provide safeguards which would
protect the interests of the backward Telangana.14
The strong agitation for Telangana statehood that emerged in the
late 1960s has to be seen in the context of gross violation of the ‘Gentleman's
Agreement’ in the decade following the formation of the
state of Andhra Pradesh. The regional council, which was formed for
the development of Telangana, was reduced to a farce and there was
gross violation of Mulkhi rules. In fact, the entire political process
came to be dominated by powerful men from the Andhra region
and the Telangana leaders were only ‘to play the supporting role’
(Sheshadri 1970).
The 1969 Telangana agitation was initiated by and participated
in overwhelmingly by students and the employees. 15 The crucial
issue in this phase was the favouring of Andhraits in education
and employment in violation of mulki rules. It was only later that
professional politicians from the Congress entered the movement and
gave it an explicit political direction by taking over the leadership of
the Telangana Praja Samithi (TPS). Though the movement initially
was by and large based in urban areas with students and middle
classes constituting the main support base, it spread to the rural areas
in the later phases. This is evident in the fact that the TPS won 10
parliamentary seats in the Telangana region in the 1971 parliament
elections.16 Because of the high-handedness of the Congress High
Command and the political compromises of the TPS leadership, the
movement could only achieve few concessions even though it went
on for more than a year.
What is significant to note about this movement are the
contradictory
consequences it brought to the politics of Telangana. A clear
social polarisation of the emergent social forces in the political arena
can be observed in this connection. While the students from upper
caste landed social background got polarised around the established
electoral parties, the lower caste students (the first-generation literates
entering into the portals of higher education) gravitated to the radical
anti-feudal politics of the emergent CPI (ML) and catalysed its growth
and expansion. This is one of the reasons for the CPI(ML) groups’
sensitivity to the Telangana demand which is in sharp contrast to the
rigid stand of the CPM which has been led by the coastal Andhraits.
Though the Telangana demand is continued to be raised by certain
sections of the intelligentsia and political opinion in the later period,
it is only from the mid-1990s that we see an increased visibility to and
mobilisation on this issue, largely due to the efforts of the CPI(ML)
groups and civil society associations. The wider popular support to
the demand for Telangana has to be seen against the backdrop of the
Chandrababu Naidu regime and the neoliberal policies initiated by it.
The decline of public employment leading to frustration among the
educated unemployed, privatisation of Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs),
neglect of agriculture leading to farmers’ suicides in Telangana and
conversion of Hyderabad into a real estate haven for the coastal Andhra
speculators are the major developments that affected Telangana under
this regime.
It is against this background that the formation of Telangana Rastra
Samithi (TRS) in 2001 by a dissident from the Telugu Desam Party
(TDP) has to be appreciated. With the entry of the TRS, an explicit
political articulation of the Telangana issue and the deepening of the
social support for the demand could be noticed. The electoral outcome
in the 2004 elections in terms of defeat of the TDP and victory of the
Congress–TRS alliance demonstrates this.17 Though it is incorrect to
characterise the TRS’ politics as a movement for the realisation of a
separate Telangana as it has largely confined itself to elections and
lobbying in the corridors of power as strategies for the realisation of
this demand, it is its ability to garner the social forces generated by the
civil society activism to its side in the electoral arena which contributed
to its electoral success.18
What could clearly be noticed during the decade-long articulation
of the Telangana demand since the mid-1990s is a clear shift in the
discursive terrain. This cannot be attributed to any single homogenous
agency. It is a result of the convergence of a variety of groups
comprising
civil society associations, writers’ groups, cultural organisations
and political parties19 on the need for the Telangana state, despite
the differences in their political positions and discursive strategies. If
the multiplicity of organisations engaged at the grass roots with the
Telangana issue has been instrumental in spreading the message of
Telangana, then multi-dimensional engagement— political, social,
literary and cultural— is demonstrative of the expanse and depth it has
acquired in popular imagination. What unites these organisational and
discursive efforts, is their critique of the hegemonic linguistic principle
— language being the ‘sole’ basis for retaining the Telugu state of AP
and for denying statehood to Telangana. They have sought to expose
the shallowness in the claim for holding the two regions together on the
assumption that Telugu-speaking people are one imagined community;
it is the exposure of the vacuity of the concept of Vishalandhra that
has been the aim of these grass-roots efforts. At a deeper level the
historical fact that these two regions have been under different political
systems for almost two centuries20 resulting in the differences in terms
of historical trajectories, political economy of development, social
structure, cultural–literary formation and distinct regional identities has
been highlighted in the discourses on Telangana. It is this discursive
critique we will now turn to.
Broadly, three trends in the discursive articulation on Telangana
can be identified: one, the discourses that emphasise the political
factors;
second, discourses that attempt a critique of the economic
backwardness;
and third are those that aim at constructing the identity of
Telangana as an imagined community in opposition to the Vishalandhra
identity.
Political discourses on Telangana have been fairly simple and
straightforward. They have varied from emphasis on the political marginalisation
of the Telangana leadership to a critique of state policy
that led to the undermining of the rights of the Telangana people in
the Telangana region itself. The opponents have tried to brush aside
the Telangana demand by characterising this as an expression of the
selfish personal ambitions of the Telangana political leaders. Though
the marginalisation of the local people in education and employment
are important factors but unlike the 1960s movement, the present one
has much deeper social roots and density in terms of social and cultural
imagination. Therefore the political reductionism implicit in the above
discourse fails to capture the dynamics of the present movement.
There is a strong trend in the discourses on Telangana which voice
the theme of backwardness. It is argued that Telangana has remained
backward because of its merger with Andhra with: (a) Andhra settlers
occupying the fertile lands of Telangana, (b) Andhra capital dominating
the industry and real estate in the urban centres in Telangana, and
(c) controlling the resources in Telangana for their benefit through
the use of governmental power.21 What is emphasised here is that the
logic of ‘internal colonialism’ that led to the reduction of Telangana
into a colony of coastal Andhra.22 The obvious pointer is that as long
as Telangana remains part of the unified state, it would not be able to
develop and the solution to it is separate statehood to Telangana.23
What is lost sight of because of the political and economic
determinism
of the above discourses is the deeper processes of
transformation
in the popular everyday commonsense consciousness. The
most formidable challenge to the linguistic idea of Vishalandhra, seen
as the most desirable framework for the Telugu-speaking people, is
available in this commonsense transformation. What is amazing
about this phenomenon which, following the spirit of the argument
of Benedict Anderson (1983), can be characterised as the creation of
an imagined Telangana community.
Going by the Andersonian perspective discussed in the first section,
the Telugu nationality should have been a reality because it has the two
important ingredients— common language and print capitalism—
that go to forge nation as an imagined community. Print capitalism in
Andhra, in its more than a century of history of expansion, has created
a standardised print language out of the dialects of Krishna, Guntur
and Godavari districts. Of course, what facilitated popular support to
it are the social reform movements and literary renaissance of the late
nineteenth century and the subsequent political movements, i.e., the
nationalist and communist movements in the Andhra region which
were intellectually dominated by the leadership coming from these
districts.
 The fact that all the vernacular newspapers have been owned and
controlled by the Andhra elite has only fastened this process.
Legitimacy
was bestowed on this officially by the political regimes ever since
the AP state was formed in 1956 through the public education system
(through textbooks and teacher training, etc). Print media, radio and
other official channels have played a significant role in paving the
way for the process of standardisation of Telugu language and forging
adherence of literate class to linguistic uniformity and homogeneity.
The conspicuous proliferation of what can be called ‘visual’
capitalism
in the form of cinema since the 1970s 24 and the television since the
1980s25, dominated almost entirely by the Andhra entrepreneurs, has
furthered this process. N. T. Rama Rao (NTR), a popular film actor
and an icon created by the coastal Andhra dominated film industry,
established the TDP and the party came to power in 1983. It may
be recollected that NTR sought to project the frequent interference
of the Congress high command into the affairs of the state Congress
and government as a loss of Telugu self-respect and alternatively
the TDP’s victory in 1983 election was seen as the restoration of
Telugu pride. NTR’s discourse of the injured Telugu self-respect was
not only reminiscent of the Vishalandhra slogan of 1950s but also a
replay of it. In the context of popular discontent against the bankrupt
Congress rule in the state, the TDP could successfully ignite the
popular imagination and win the 1983 elections.26 The rise of NTR
to power in the state through the cultural–nationalist rhetoric of Telugu
pride and self-respect could act as a catalyst in the linguistic cultural
homogenisation process.
Against this background, the demand for Telangana assumes
importance
as a counter-instance to the theoretical thrust of Andersonian
argument. The crucial question is: Why, despite all the ingredients
for the formation of a nationality on the basis of Telugu language, the
state has seen a series of challenges to the very idea of Vishalandhra
and a subterraneous process that challenges the legitimacy of the idea
and asserts the Telangana identity. Further, given the importance of the
NTR phenomenon in AP politics, it is necessary to ask: Why a state,
which saw such an assertion of Telugu identity in the 1980s in the form
of the TDP’s rise, apparently transcending the sub-regional identities
asserted during the 1960s, is once again witnessing a strong assertion
of Telangana identity within a decade? What are the sources that give
the Telangana identity an advantage over Vishalandhra identity which
enjoys the resources of print, visual and electronic capitalism?
 In a significant sense, the Telangana assertion could be seen as a
reaction
to the above process as it challenges the very idea of standardised
Telugu language27 and exposes the hegemonic design implicit in the
homogenisation process through which the dialects of the advanced
coastal districts of Krishna, Guntur and Godavari have been privileged
as the standard Telugu.
The Telangana movement sharply focuses on the dialect–language
distinction between Telangana and Andhra and problematises the
idea of possibility of unity on the basis of language. The immediate
provocation for this comes from the popular cinema dominated by
producers, directors and actors from these districts, which make fun
of the Telangana dialects,28 which are generally spoken by marginal
characters, comedians and villains. The celluloid presentation of
Telangana society and culture, characterised through the idiom, body
languages and images of these characters, is seen as a clear
demonstration
of their contemptuous dismissal of the people and culture of
Telangana.
As stated earlier, the present movement, articulated by a variety of
civil society organisations, differs from the 1969 movement in depth
and reach. What informs the present articulation of the Telangana
issue is the deep distrust by the common people, informed largely
by their everyday experience, at the idea of a unified Telugu state.
The TDP regime under NTR brought intensity to this idea through
his political play of Telugu pride and self-respect. However, what
happened dialectically in his political regime was the Andhraisation or
dominance of economy, politics and society by the Andhra elite. The
massive in-migration from coastal Andhra and development of landed
and capital interests by Andhraites in Telangana, encouragement to
adopt green revolution technology, the neglect and displacement of the
traditional tank system by bore-well irrigation in Telangana leading to
the decline of agriculture and displacement, all of these induced by state
policy has had a drastic impact on the social and economic ecology
of Telangana. The transformation of agri-culture into agro-business
resulted in a crisis in the agrarian countryside and impoverishment of
the small peasantry in Telangana leading to large-scale out-migration
from Telangana villages to far off places in search of work.
The rise of the Telangana identity politics in the 1990s is a reaction to
the process of Andhraisation in the garb of Telugu self-respect. If the
1960s Telangana movement was a reaction to the violation of Mulki
rules, then the 1990s movement could be read as a reaction to the
TDP’s Andhra rule.
The clue to this can be found in the cultural expressions and
modes articulating the Telangana issue. It is saddening to note that
the political and economic arguments and discourses on Telangana
are extremely imitative and only replicate those already present in
the mainstream parliamentary and developmental discourses. The
way Telangana is seen in these discourses can be characterised as
instrumentalist, for they emphasise that Telangana would bring jobs,
irrigation and developmental projects to locals. The response to this
from the political regime and the opponents of the Telangana demand
is quite predictable: allocate more development funds and that will
solve the problem.
In contrast, the strength of the Telangana movement is drawn from
the cultural sphere. 29 It has given rise to an upsurge of the cultural
production in the form of song-performance and of course, fiction. In
these resurgent folk cultural forms of expression, Telangana is
configured
as both worthy of celebration and also mourning. 30 The dialectic
of mourning and celebration, sense of loss and presence and despair
and hope contrast Telangana with coastal Andhra in interesting ways.
While expressing anger at the insult and marginalisation caused to the
Telangana language and people’s culture, the task of celebrating its
richness and of restoring respectability to it is also highlighted. While
the decline of traditional agriculture and crafts is mourned invoking
idyllic images of their presence in rural Telangana in the past, what is
being celebrated as worth remembering about Telangana is its sense
of community that is counter-posed to the unbridled individualism of
coastal Andhra. Telangana stands out as an abode of idyllic harmony
with nature seen in opposition to commercialisation, profit seeking
and over exploitation of nature represented by coastal Andhra. If the
social and political discourses, reflecting the concerns of modernity
lament for the Telangana lagging behind coastal Andhra in different
modern spheres like education, agriculture, irrigation, industry, etc.,
the folk-cultural celebrates the traditional livelihood patterns like artisanal
occupations as appropriate and the move away from that is seen
as a deviation caused by capital and greed and therefore mourned, as
presented in a song by the famous poet Goreti Venkanna, as a loss.31
If more than a century of colonial modernity has wiped out the
traditional life patterns in coastal Andhra, then despite the
transformation,
the traces or ‘fragments’ still remain as expression of continuity
and hope in Telangana. What the cultural movement in Telangana
has resurrected is to bring the fragment to bear upon the social whole
and to enlarge it to signify the Telangana identity.
What the artistic cultural expression of song-performance effects is
an invocation of a collective historical memory that is capable of forging
an ‘imagined community’ of Telangana. 32 Cultural performances, like
for instance the Telangana Dhum Dham, are an important activity
of the cultural organisations, enacted as grand spectacles to spread
the message of loss that Telangana suffers because of the social and
cultural dominance of Andhra region. They have been a principal mode
of communicating the cultural need to recover the lost identity. It is
rather here in the cultural domain that popular classes search for and
identify the authentic voice of Telangana. Telangana, in contrast to
Andhra, has historically seen the importance of cultural practice as a
necessary accompaniment of political activity. Given the low literacy
and continual presence of folk cultural forms, the song-performance
has been a major mode of popular communication in Telangana.33
It is the subterraneous cultural transformation and articulation
brought about by the cultural activism through activities like Telangana
Dhum Dham (see Ramulu 2006) that is the strength of the Telangana
movement, which during the last decade has grown from strength to
strength, where the vision of an alternative democratic and people’s
Telangana is located. This expression moves forward dynamically
despite the bankruptcy of the electoral politics in Telangana.
The Telangana movement, seen from the perspective of cultural
politics,
could be read as an engagement with the problematisation of
the language–territory–market relation that is taken for granted in the
explanation of nationality question and its justification as a legitimate
framework.
IV
The Telangana demand raises an important question: can the people
be held together merely on the basis of language even when they do
not imagine themselves as a community? The case of Telangana in fact
shows the power of historical memories and the social and political
differences vis-à-vis a common language. The periodic articulation
of the Telangana demand demonstrates the disrupted trajectory of
the formation of the Telugu nationality and the failure of the idea of
Vishalandhra— the integrated Andhra or unified state— to be the
basis of an imagined community.
 The Telangana movement brings out two important issues to the
fore. One is that during the last five decades, since the linguistic states’
reorganisation, there have been questions raised about the continual
relevance of the linguistic framework. The movements for new states
have brought forth new issues and fresh perspectives to the fore which
are expressions of popular aspirations. These movements reflect the
problems related to lopsided economic development and neglect,
political marginalisation and cultural neglect of the backward areas
and their life patterns, and social practices and dialects. These
problems
are stark in the states which have been carved out by merging
regions from the two distinct historical backgrounds of princely and
colonial India.
As shown in the case of Telangana, there are deeper cultural politics
involved in the demand for separate statehood. In the dominant
paradigm,
these movements are treated as expressions of the frustration of
disgruntled politicians, factional conflicts within the dominant party
—in most cases it was the Congress— and the lack of development.
In other words, the causes are identified by placing primacy on the
party political and economic factors. The deeper sources of the identity
articulation related to historical memory and cultural specificity are
either ignored or underplayed.
The response to these movements thus has been, especially during
the period of Congress dominance in Indian politics, one of suppression
coupled with promise of special administrative and economic
packages
and political rearrangements in the form of replacing the chief
ministers and increasing the representation to the agitating regions.
As a result, the deeper aspirations underlying such demands have
been left unaddressed.
The main thrust of the Telangana movement lies in the fact that it
problematises the nationality concept that privileges language as
the basis for states’ reorganisation in India. The Telangana question
clearly demonstrates the power of historical memories and distinct
cultural formations in shaping regional identities and the need to
take cognisance of them in the (re-)organisation of the states rather
than just conforming to rigid linguistic framework. In other words,
what is seen unfolding in the Telangana movement is not limited to the
specific case of Telangana but has wider significance. The recognition
of this fact would further the democratisation process in India.
Annexure
The famous song ‘Palle kanneeru peduthundo’ by Goreti Venkanna, which is
sung by cultural troops cutting across political affiliations, has been issued as
a cassette and CD.
A small section of the song is presented here to illustrate the argument:

Palle kanneeru peduthundo kanipinchani kutrala

Naa thalli bandhi ayipothundo kanipinchani kutrala

Kummari vagulo thummalu molisenu

Kammari vagulo dummu regenu
Pedda badisha moddu barinan&#x005C;di
Saalela moggam saduliriginavi
Chethi vruthula chethulirigipaye naa pallellona
Ayyo grama swarajyam ganga lona paye ee deshamlona

Madugulanni aduganti poyinavi

Baavulu savuku daggarayyinavi
Vagulu vankalu yendipoyinavi
Saakali poyyilu kopolipoyinavi
Pedda boru poddantha nadusthundo balisina doraladi
Mari peda raithula bavulendukende na pallellona

Eedulanni masi boggulainavi

Eetha kallu bangaramayyinadi mandu kalipina kalloo thagina mandi kalla
nindoosulayinavi
Challani beeru whishkilevadu pampe na pallelloki
Are bussuna ponge pepsi kola vache na pallellloki “palle”

(The village is weeping.

In unknown plots, the mother is being bonded
Thumma [thorn] trees have grown in the potter’s furnace
Dust has covered the blacksmith’s chimney
The big barisa [chisel] has gone rough
The weaver’s shuttle is broken
The hands of the artisans are broken in my villages
The village’s freedom is drowned in the Ganges
 The small ponds ran dry
The wells are near to death
The brooks and other water sources ran dry
The stoves of washer community have fallen down
The big bore of the rich men is running for the whole day
But, the poor peoples’ wells have run dry
The toddy trees became waste sticks
The toddy has become invaluable thing
The people who drunk the mixed toddy with chemical
Their eyes are filled with dust
Who sent the chilled beer and whisky to my village
Who sent cold pepsi cola into my village)

Notes
1. Similar demands for statehood in Vidarbha, Marathwada, Gorkhaland,
Purvanchal, Bundelkhand and Harit Pradesh have long been articulated
by mass movements in these regions. For an analysis of the Harit Pradesh
demand, see Singh (2001).
2. The literature on nationality question in India is vast. For an overview
on it see, Karat (1973); Guha (1982); Alam (1983); Vanaik (1988).
3. For an analysis of belated or ‘second’ way transition to capitalism, see,
Kaviraj (1984).
4. The Congress accepted the principle of linguistic provinces and passed a
resolution to that effect in its Nagpur session in 1920.
5. For a historical account of the nationality crystallisation in India, see
Karat (1973).
6. For a recent analysis of the relationship between the capitalism and
linguistic
nationality identities, see D. N. (1989).
7. For an activist account of the specificity of Telangana, see Sundarayya and
Chattopadhyay (1972); Reddy (1973 and 1992). Also, see Pavier (1981).
8. For a graphic presentation of this scenario, see Rao (1977). The roots
of resistance to the merger with Andhra region could be traced these
experiences.
9. For an analysis of the regional differences in political and social
articulation,
see Srinivasulu (2002).
10. For an account of the literary and cultural developments that form the
context of the emergence of Telugu linguistic identity in the Madras
presidency,
see Ramakrishna (1993). For a historical account of the Telugu
identity formation and the role of literature, see Nagaraju (1995).
11. It stated:
the theory of ‘one language one state’ which is neither justified on
grounds of linguistic homogeneity, because there can be more than
one state speaking the same language without offending the linguistic
principle, nor practicable, since different language groups, including
the vast Hindi-speaking population of the Indian Union, cannot
always be consolidated to form distinct linguistic units (Government of
India, 1955, p. 46).
12. The major difference between the nature of political struggles in the
two regions has be noted: the Andhra region, being part of the colonial
rule, was drawn into the nationalist movement where as in Hyderabad, the
struggle was for responsible government and civil rights. Because of the
fact that Andhra was part of the anti-colonial struggle, Congress leaders
here had stronger connection with the national leadership compared to
the leaders of Telangana.
13. It appears that a section of the national leadership of the Congress was
not very favourably disposed to the idea of Vishalandhra. The instance
which is often quoted by the supporters of Telangana movement is the
statement of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru characterising the idea
of ‘Vishalandhra’ as an expression of ‘expansionist imperialism’. Indian
Express, 17 October 1953, cited in Jayashankar (2004: 2).
14. The ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ was signed in Delhi on 20 February 1956
by the leaders representing Telangana and Andhra. For a discussion on
it, see Narayana Rao (1973).
Some of the important terms and guidelines for the future party
leadership
and governments of the state to protect the interests of the less
developed Telangana were as follow: (a) the implementation of Mulki
rules in service matters in Telangana; (b) establishment of regional
council for the development of Telangana; (c) the sale of agricultural
lands in Telangana should be controlled by the Regional Council;
(d) creation of more educational and irrigational facilities for the
Telangana region; (e) If the chief minister is from one region, then the
deputy chief minister should be from other region; the distribution of
the cabinet positions to the Telangana and Andhra should be in the
proportion of 40:60 and the former should be allocated two of the
following prime portfolios of home, finance, revenue, planning and
development, commerce and industry; separate provincial Congress
committee for Telangana up to the end of 1962.
15. For an account of the 1969 Telangana movement see, Forrester (1970);
Gray (1971).
16. Despite the larger appeal and implications of the movement, the dominant
perspective has viewed the Telangana movement in terms of the
middleclass
concern at government employment almost to the exclusion of
substantial concerns of other sections of society like farmers, working
class, etc. See Parthasarathy, Ramana and Rama Rao (1973).
17. For an analysis of the 2004 assembly and parliamentary elections, see
Srinivasulu (2004); also in Wallace and Roy (2007).
18. A major limitation in the perspectives on Telangana is the failure to
differentiate
between the politics of movement and electoral politics. Most
of the analysts interpret the popular support for the Telangana movement
in terms of the electoral fortunes of the TRS, the visible political voice of
the demand in the electoral domain. This view is narrow and incorrect
for the following reasons: first, the Telangana demand cannot be reduced
to the TRS because it has been articulated by a wide variety of organisations,
some of which differ with the TRS; and second, the electoral
presence and performance of the TRS has largely been influenced by and
in fact, consequent upon popular opinion and mood created by the civil
society associations and cultural organisations.
19. With the exception of the CPM, all the political parties including the CPI
have expressed their support to the Telangana demand. This support is of
course with differences in emphasis. For a critical evaluation of the CPI
(M) stand on Telangana, see Ashok (2008).
20. The coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema districts were handed over by
the Nizam to the British in 1766 and 1800 respectively. Since then,
there had hardly been any interaction between these two regions and
Telangana region which remained under the Nizam’s rule. It was only
with the emergence of Communists and the Congress in the Hyderabad
state that interaction between the political elite of these regions became
possible. Sundarayya, while arguing in favour of Vishalandhra, mentions
this fact without recognising its implications for the Vishalandhra project
(Sundarayya 1990: 3).
21. The above two arguments formed the core of public discourses on
Telangana and articulated through a wide range of media and modes of
communications like public meetings, songs, newspaper articles,
pamphlets,
booklets, etc. For instance, the well known Telangana spokesman
K. Jayashankar in his book presented a detailed statistical account to
emphasise the fact of uneven development of the two regions as the basis
of the demand for Telangana state. See Jayashankar (2004).
22. Some of the Telugu pamphlets and booklets have been bold enough
to push the argument of internal colonisation. For instance, Telangana
Abhivrudhi: Midhya– Vasthavam (Telangana’s Development: Illusion and
Reality), Telangana Vidhyavanthula Vedika, Hyderabad, 2006.
23. Recently, the economist Ch Hanumantha Rao in his paper, ‘Regional
Disparities,
Smaller States and Statehood for Telangana’, has also argued in
favour of small states as a viable framework for regional development (Rao
2009). available at http://telanganautsav.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/-
telangana-movement-beyond-electoral-considerations-ch-h/(accessed
10 June 2010).
24. Andhra Pradesh is one of the few states leading in the production,
distribution
and exhibition of films. As far as the production of regional films
is concerned, the Telugu film industry occupies a leading position along
with the Tamil industry.
25. Presently, there are around a dozen TV channels with specific focus on
news, cinema and women issues.
26. Multiple messages were sought to be read into this political event which
was an electoral contest between the Congress and TDP: Centre versus
States; Hindi versus Telugu; national versus regional; insult to Telugus
versus assertion of Telugu self-respect.
27. There has been a proliferation of pamphlets, booklets, anthologies of short
story, essay and song to show and celebrate the differences of language
and idiom between Andhra and Telangana regions. This has had a
demonstrative
effect on the social and political discourse in Telangana.
28. It is not only Telangana dialect but also the dialects of northern coastal
Andhra and of Rayalaseema that are also made fun of and scorned at.
While the protagonist is shown to be from the advanced region, the
comedians and villains are shown to be from the backward Telangana
and Rayalaseema regions. The contrast is obviously highlighted through
the medium of language and etiquette.
29. The cultural movement in Telangana, championed by Praja Natya
Mandali, Telangana Sanskrutika Samakya, Telangana Dharuvu Kala
Brundamu, etc., and personified by the balladeers like Andhesri, Gaddar,
Goreti Venkanna and Rasamayi Balakrishna, among a host of other
song-performers, has played a crucial role in accessing cultural resources
to shape the Telangana identity. It is this cultural movement which has
been crucial in undoing the impact of the visual capitalism.
30. See Annexure. For the text of the song and its translation, see Kumar
(2009).
31. Unfortunately, the discourse on Telangana continues to be dominated
by political and economic determinism. The power of the above cultural
transformation is yet to be taken cognisance of in the political articulation
of the Telangana movement.
32. Telangana emerged as a major theme for the mainstream commercial
cinema in the 1990s and some of them, like Ose Ramulamma, became major
successes at the box office. It is the commercial cinema which, to some
 extent, seems to have understood the importance and power of Telangana
folk culture, the evidence of which could be seen in its adaptation of folk
themes and songs.
33. In Andhra, cinema has totally replaced it; it is the record dance culture
imitating cinema which is found here.

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(Fifty Years of Hyderabad: Memoirs). Hyderabad: Narsinga Rao Smaraka
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A Study of Krishna District of Andhra, C 1850–1900’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 20 (25 and 26): 60–69.
Reddy, Ravi Narayan. 1973. Heroic Telengana: Reminiscences and Experiences.
Delhi: Communist Party of India.
———. 1992. Na Jivan Pathamlo (In the Path of My Life). Hyderabad: Musi
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 8
Competing Imaginations: Language and
Anti-colonial Nationalism in India
Tharakeshwar V. B.

Language Nationalism and

Anti-colonial Nationalism
Nationalism in Europe is predominantly based on language, which
itself arose in the context of developments in the field of print
technology and print capitalism (Anderson 1983). However in the
Indian subcontinent, we witness different communities getting
envisaged/imagined on the basis of various other issues/factors. It is
not that language identities and accompanying nationalism (generally
called as linguistic nationalism, and sometimes called in post-1947
terminology as subnationalism, regionalism) did not have any presence
here. During the colonial situation in India, language-based identities
took shape due to the activities of the colonial state, with missionaries
in the area of print technology working with language elites, trained
in European model of education, chipping in. However, as Partha
Chatterjee (1986, 1993) and Sudipta Kaviraj (1998) would tell us,
these language-based identities were not in a position to wrest power
from the colonial authority, which was a supra-language power. So
a new anti-colonial nationalism, which we today identify as Indian
nationalism, arose. It is this anti-colonial nationalism that became a
triumphant discourse during the 1940s; of course it had to contend with
religion-based nationalism which eventually led to the formation of
two nation states. There were other strands in the nationalist discourse
too which were competing for hegemony and could not succeed.
The Congress which was spearheading the nationalist movement did
envisage the challenges that a language-based nationalism/identity/
imagined community could pose to it and tried to address it from
1920s onwards. This finally lead to the reorganisation of Indian
territory on the basis of language in 1956. This chapter is concerned
with the language-based imagined community and other competing
 Competing Imaginations

imaginations during that period in Princely Mysore, which was

not under direct colonial rule. Such an exercise would help us in
understanding the fissures that are haunting the language-based state
formation within the Indian Union today.
Contemporary Fissures in Kannada Identity
In Karnataka, a state within an Indian nation state which was the
result of a negotiation between Indian nationalism and Kannada-
based language identity, we hear now and then, though there are
not any concerted efforts or movements— demands for a separate
north Karnataka state (erstwhile Bombay presidency and parts which
were transferred to Karnataka from Hyderabad Nizam’s territory),
special status for Hyderabad Karnataka, Tulu-naadu (Tulu is the
language
spoken along with Kannada and Konkani in coastal regions
of Karnataka) and a separate Coorg state (which actually from
independence till 1956, had a separate government of its own). Such
voices which are raised today are not only the result of contemporary
socioeconomic and political factors but also of the historical forces that
shaped Kannada identity in a particular way during late nineteenth
and early part of twentieth century.
Constraints of Language Nationalism
By looking at the context of Karnataka and Kannada literature of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, i.e., prior to transfer of
power to newly formed India and Pakistan in 1947, I would say that
Kannada nationalism, though it emerged and succeeded in imagining
a Kannada community, could not articulate itself in terms of a nation
or nation state for the geographic region, which it identified as its own.
It had to be content with playing second fiddle to Indian nationalism.
This was due to the historical–political situation in which the region
was caught up. The polity of the spaces that the Kannadigas inhabited
shaped their imagination of the future political possibilities. Thus
the peculiar situation in which the region that Kannada
nationalism
claimed as its own during the colonial period, constrained its
imagination and consequent articulations. It could never articulate a
nation state of its own. In that sense, Kannada nationalism failed to
arrive at its designated arrival point (that is, if we accept the trajectory
of European nationalism as the designated path for any nationalism).
This essay would examine the context in which Kannada nationalism
 Tharakeshwar V. B.

took shape, and the context in which it played second fiddle to Indian
nationalism. The essay does not directly look at Kannada identity in
the post-1956 era; it tries to historically trace reasons for some of the
anxieties that Kannada identity is fraught with today.
If we take up the preconditions enunciated by Anderson for a
nationalism to emerge, then all those preconditions did exist in Princely
Mysore/Karnataka and a community called Kannadigas was being
imagined, through the construction of the history of Mysore; the
history of Kannada language, Kannada literature and Karnataka; the
standardisation of Kannada script and language; translations that
prepared the language and the people to negotiate with modernity.1
However, at the same time, in the context of cultural nationalism,
we see in Kannada literature a certain kind of pan-Indian community
is also being imagined. So there were two communities being imagined,
each one claiming to be a nation.
Sudipta Kaviraj refers to a similar situation in Bengal of the nineteenth
century. In Bengal, according to Kaviraj, this Bengali identity which
he calls ‘regional’, was later subsumed by the larger national identity.
He accounts for this ‘gerrymandering of the boundaries of selfhood
or collective identity’ thus:
If the Bengali jati (nation) is an unlikely candidate for successful
struggle against the might of British imperialism, the search for a viable
nation has to look in other directions. Bengalis did not constitute the
stuff of a good nation not because they were lacking in sentiments of
solidarity, but because they could not provide a credible opposition
to the British empire (1997: 318, italics in original and the words in
parenthesis mine).

Relation Between Kannada Nationalism and

Indian Nationalism
However, in Karnataka, the Kannada identity was more vocal and did
not get easily subsumed under a pan-Indian national identity. The
question of need for devising a credible opposition to the British
empire did not arise at all in Princely Mysore as it was not under
direct British rule. Even when it arose, with the visibility of pan-Indian
nationalism in Karnataka (that is after the 1930s), talk of Kannada
nationalism continued to exist alongside Indian nationalism. This
led to repeated clarifications from Alur Venkatarao, the prominent
leader of Karnataka nationalism regarding the relationship between
Kannada nationalism — which he calls ‘Karnatakatwa’ (Karnatakism)
or ‘Karnataka Rashtriyate’ (Karnataka nationalism) — and the Indian
national movement launched by the Congress. The kind and range
of imagery used to define this relationship is very interesting:
Karnataka is a lens through which we look at India and the world
…. Indian culture is internalised in Kannada culture and Kannada
culture is internalised in Indian culture. Karnataka is a living part of
an organic India, Karnataka devi (the goddess of Karnataka) is the
daughter of Bharata devi (the goddess of India) … Indian culture is
also Karnataka culture … Karnataka culture has been nourishing
Indian culture since ages and it is a unique culture … Karnatakism is
not against nationalism and nationalism that is against Karnatakism
is not nationalism … The feeling that I am first Indian and then a
Karnatakian is wrong. There is no question of first and second in this,
they are not two opposing things … Karnataka is the first to save India
from the danger of a foreign rule and for it India should be grateful
to Karnataka forever … Kannada language and land is our inner
courtyard and India is our outer courtyard in the map of the World …
Bharati devi is the utsavamurthy2 of the world and Karnataka devi is the
utsavamuthy of Bharati devi … (Venkatarao 1999: 190–99).

While looking at the above description of the relationship between

Karnataka and India by Venkatarao, we have to keep in mind
that it was written as ‘Karnatakatwada Sootragalu’ (formulas of
Karnatakatwa) in 1957 after independence and the formation of
Karnataka state with the unification of Kannada-speaking regions.
So it can be argued that it was inevitable for Venkatarao to accept the
existing political formation and assert Kannada nationalism within
it, and also define the relationship in such a way that it does not
question the existing accepted political order. However even earlier,
he was not against the Indian national movement. He participated in
the non-cooperation movement launched by Gandhi; he served as the
vice-president of the local Congress Committee but resigned stating
that he did not share the views of Gandhi opposing the insertion of
social reforms into political struggles against the British (Venkatarao
1974: 166–67).
What is interesting in the above quote and in his formula of
Karnatakatwa is that he presents a system involving three concentric
circles: one is a global order, the other is India and then Karnataka.
However, he is not setting up a hierarchy here. For him, they are
concentric: Karnataka is in the middle, surrounded by India and then
the world. It is only by firmly locating oneself in Karnatakatwa that
a Kannadiga can look at India and the world. Karnatakatwa is the
lens through which we can realise the essence of India and the world.
The concrete realisation of a world order happens only through India
and one encounters India only through Karnatakatwa. In one of his
English letters written in 1929, he defines Karnatakatwa like this:
From my experience of public life in Karnatak [sic] and also from
my experience in other fields, I have come to the conclusion that
no movement political or otherwise is possible unless there is this
Karnatakatwa in us. By Karnatakatwa, I mean the sum total of all our
feelings and duties towards Karnatak (like Hindutwa). So it is that from
the political field, I turned to this less ambitious but more solid work.
My Karnatakatwa is somewhat different from ‘Pravincialism’ [sic]
(Venkatarao 1999: 9, words in parenthesis are in original).

He clearly defines Karnatakatwa as a commitment to the land and its

people and compares it with Hindutwa. He dismisses the idea that it
is provincialism or regionalism. For him, it is a religion on which the
Kannada nation should be built.
This becomes clearer if we look at how he defines the essence of
the world and India in particular. His notion of the essence of the
world and India is quite interesting:
The World culture is Sanatana culture that defies any dating, a
ubiquitous culture. It has two forms: one is its general form and the
other is a specific form. Our great saints have promoted both the forms
and both are found in our India. India, that gave space to all castes,
religions, sects, races and nationalities without any discrimination, is
the sign of this general form. … Our saints have molded this general
essence into a specific form by establishing a specific religion, tradition
and system of rituals. It is the responsibility of all Indians to protect
this specific form of India. This specific form is a model that the
whole world can follow. … Only those who don’t accept the general
form are our enemies. Those who don’t accept this specific form
are not our enemies. This specific form can be termed Hindutwa or
Hinditwa, the name is not important but the meaning is (Venkatarao
1999: 190–91).

His problem with Indian nationalists in Karnataka was that some of

them did not support his Karnatakatwa and they thought that it was
against the Indian national struggle. He further says that if they had not
fought for Karnatakatwa and the reunification of Kannada-speaking
regions during the colonial period, then there would have been no
Karnataka in post-independent India (ibid.: 12–13). This statement,
though coming from the vantage point of the post-reunification
of Karnataka in 1957, clearly shows the commitment to Kannada
nationalism that certain elite groups had during the colonial period.
Venkatarao gives an important place to literature in the task of
evolving Kannada nationalism:
Literature is the life-force that sustains the nation. Literature is not
just a discourse. … Unless there is an awakened consciousness
about the language there can be no awakened consciousness about
the land (1999: 198).

For him, it is not just enough to have a political reunification of the

Kannada-speaking regions; the precondition is cultural unification.
This task of cultural reunification can be best carried out by literature.
To support literature, new institutions are needed. So he supported
the formation of Mysore University, and made an attempt to have
a university for entire Karnataka. He also played a key role in the
activities of Vidyavardhaka Sangha of Dharwad and the Kannada
Sahitya Parishat. He resigned from Kannada Sahitya Parishat in 1938
protesting against the attitude of the members of Princely Mysore
who he felt were not heeding to the voice of the members of north
Karnataka.
It is worth mentioning here that the first attempt to resolve
the tension between Kannada nationalism and Indian nationalism
happens in poetry in 1928. Kuvempu (K. V. Puttappa) in his poem,
which is today recognised as the Naada Geete (state anthem of
Karnataka), uses kinship terms to resolve the issue of two mothers
that the Kannada literature envisaged — that of Bharatha Maata and
Kannada Maata. When confronted with two mothers, the poem calls
one the grandmother and the other a mother, i.e., Kannada Maata
becomes the daughter of Bharatha Maata (Kuvempu 2000: 106).
Literature and litterateurs, especially B. M. Srikantia, played a key
role in Kannada cultural nationalism. However, there is a difference
between Alur Venkatarao who hails from the erstwhile Bombay
presidency (i.e., today’s north Karnataka) and the litterateurs of
Princely Mysore region in their conception of Kannada nationalism.
In Princely Mysore, people like Srikantia, who contributed much
through their writings and activities towards cultural nationalism,
were not so comfortable with political reunification. This brings us
to the question of the then existing political entities and their
relationship
with the choices made by different social groups.
Princely State and Presidency Regions
In Princely Mysore, which was a modern state (nation) in all practical
senses, in spite of a monarchy and the interference of the Madras
presidency headed by the British, people like B. M. Srikantia couldn’t
think of a state without the King of Mysore. Their loyalty to the King
was unquestionable and in fact Srikantia is often remembered by his
title Rajasevasakta (an ardent server of the King). Though people like
Srikantia were for cultural nationalism, the political reunification of
Kannada-speaking regions posed a challenge to them as it meant either
bringing Princely Mysore under a new political entity called Karnataka
under colonial rule or as a sovereign nation without a monarch.
The people of north Karnataka, like Alur Venkatarao, who were for
both cultural and political reunification of Karnataka were ready for
either option — bringing Kannada regions under a single colonial
administration or fighting against the colonial rule for a sovereign
nation called Karnataka. The former choice would have brought about
the reunification of Karnataka, a task that might have continued to
become a struggle for freedom from colonial rule. The latter choice
would have brought both reunification and freedom together. People
like B. M. Srikantia would have agreed with the idea of a political
reunification under the rule of the King of Mysore. However, this was
not acceptable to the Kannada nationalists of north Karnataka who
were simultaneously engaged in the struggle against the British, by
aligning with the Indian National Congress.
However, litterateurs like D. V. Gundappa became more vocal about
the demand for responsible government in Princely Mysore after the
1920s, although this demand did not gain much force then. Even the
Congress did not demand the removal of the King, but expected that
the King be more lenient towards the Congress. It was because of
this factor that the Mysoreans never felt the direct impact of colonial
rule, nor did they feel that the ruler was oppressive, though the King
was expected by the colonial state in Madras Presidency to curb the
national movement in Mysore. However, this national movement
itself had not gathered much face. The demand for responsible
government in Princely Mysore acquired currency only on the eve of
the independence of India.
 The backward class movement in Princely Mysore also sought
to distance itself from the Indian National Congress, dubbing it
as a Brahmin lobby. They were loyal to the King of Mysore as
he implemented reservations in public sector as demanded by the
backward class movement, though Brahmins opposed this move.
The implementation of reservation was along the lines recommended
by the Miller Committee appointed by the King. Thus the King had
the support of this Backward Class movement till the 1940s, when
the movement and the political party carved out of it merged with the
Indian National Congress. This backward class movement was not
so particularly interested in the reunification of Karnataka, and
was certainly looking at Congress with suspicion. When it came to
cultural nationalism, none of these groups hesitated to be a part of
both the imagined communities — Kannada and India, but sans the
political dimension of these imagined communities, as these groups
wanted to stay well within their existing political order or the one
that they desired.
Opposition to State Reorganisation
on Linguistic Basis in Princely Mysore
Here it is apt to mention that on the eve of reorganisation of states
on linguistic basis, the dominant land-owning backward class
communityin Princely Mysore, the Vokkaligas, opposed the merger of
north Karnataka (both Bombay Presidency region and Hyderabad
Nizam region) stating that Mysore, which was supposed to be a
developed state, would have to bear the burden of these relatively
underdeveloped regions. This is also viewed as the question of
numerical
dominance in the new political system, as Lingayats — another
land-owning dominant community — would become the largest caste
in the new state if the states are organised on the basis of language.
This undercurrent of caste gets played out now and then in issues
such as having the headquarters of the railway zone in Hubli, having
the bench of the Karnataka High Court in Dharwar, north Karnataka
being cold to the Cauvery river water sharing dispute between farmers
of Mysore and Tamil Nadu etc.
Kannada, English, Sanskrit and
Other Indian Languages
Thus though there was a notion of a community called ‘India’ operating
in Kannada literature, it was limited only to cultural nationalism and
did not, at least in Princely Mysore region, translate into a political
one. As I have argued elsewhere (Tharakeshwar 2002), the Kannada
elite strategically needed a certain common cultural pool for enriching
Kannada cultural nationalism vis-à-vis the west and it necessitated
being part of the imagined community of India too. The increasing
number of translations from Sanskrit during this period indicates
this — nineteenth century is full of not only translations from English,
but also from Sanskrit.
The kind of relationship that Kannada and Sanskrit had earlier was
also remapped with the encounter of Kannada with colonialism. It is
said that in the pre-colonial period, the relation between Kannada and
Sanskrit was one of dominance of one culture (Sanskrit) over the other
(Kannada); and Kannada tried to negotiate with it by appropriating
Sanskrit cultural elements — not through direct translations but
through adaptations from Sanskrit — so as not to acknowledge the
debt to Sanskrit.3 The relationship between Sanskrit and Kannada
again underwent a change in the colonial period. B. M. Srikantia
and others believed that Sanskrit was the language of our ancestors,
the Aryans. Even Alur Venkatarao subscribes to this view; for him,
‘Sanskrit is our sacred language’ and ‘it should become the language
of our scholars’ (1999: 198). D. V. Gundappa was no exception to it.
Thus the Kannada elite, who was trying to challenge the hegemony of
Sanskrit till then, though for various religious reasons, on encountering
colonialism; stopped seeing Sanskrit as a hegemonic language on
encountering colonialism; it became their own language, the mother
of Kannada language. So we find an attempt by the Kannada elite to
strike an alliance with Sanskrit and a pan-Indian community to face
the challenge posed by the colonial culture. This alliance comes to be
imagined through images drawn from family, and through the use of
kinship terms as we see in the case of Kuvempu.
It is not only the question of having a strategic alliance with an
Indian community and Sanskrit that gave a fillip to the notion of an
Indian community. Translations from texts from other languages
that were part of the Indian nationalist discourse also helped put
that discourse into circulation. Since the beginning of the twentieth
century we witness pan-Indian nationalist — mainly from Bengali
and Marathi — texts getting translated into Kannada. Texts such
as Bankimchandra’s novel and novels from Marathi got translated
into Kannada. Though there was a political necessity for these texts
in north Karnataka, these texts were also read in other regions. Thus
a new subject position — that of a pan-Indian subject — also gained
currency.
 B. M. Srikantia (1983) comes out with an interesting scheme of
multiple languages for the people of Kannada-speaking regions and
for India in a speech delivered in 1911 on ‘Developing the Kannada
Language’. He argues that Kannada would be the right choice for
the language of education in Karnataka for farmers (Vokkaligas),
children and for women. For the purpose of politics (Raajakaarya,
which also refers to issues pertaining to the king), for supra-linguistic
congregations, and for issues related to Indian state, Srikantia
advocates
English (ibid.: 246).
To make a few tentative remarks on the relationship between
Kannada nationalism and Indian nationalism, let us define the
conceptof nationalism. I would agree with the formulation of Anderson
that nation is an imagined community. However, I would further
qualify that since nationalism strives to achieve the nation — which
is a geographical region with marked boundaries, claiming that the
region has ‘a specific culture’ since ages — it needs its own modern
political entity called the nation state. The basis for constructing the
specific culture with its own history could be different in each case:
if it is mainly language in Europe, it could be different in different
places. As Partha Chatterjee would argue, nationalism in India is
driven primarily by colonialism. Or it could be religion in the case
of the formation of Pakistan, apart from colonialism. The question
is: though the imagined communities based on languages evolved in
India, why did not a full-fledged nationalism, which eventually could
claim a nation and a nation state for a particular linguistic region that
it claimed as its own, evolve in India? Sanskrit, which was a dead
language or had a limited use in the present context, was associated with
the notion of the Indian nation. And an alien language like English
fused the elites of different linguistic regions, though they constituted
a marginal group in terms of numbers. This is quite contrary to the
principle that Anderson states; it is the standardisation of vernacular
languages and emergence of literature in those languages coupled
with the development of print capitalism that sowed the seeds of
nationalism in Europe. In that sense, it was a popular move which shaped
the imagination of the population. However in India, it was either a
‘dead language’ like Sanskrit or an alien language (that too the language
of the coloniser) that played a key role in Indian nationalism. Hindi
came to be associated with Indian nationalism only in the 1930s and
even today, this language too is contested as the national language.4
It was the English-knowing elite who spearheaded nationalism and
mediated between the masses and the nation that was emerging.5
 The explanation provided by Sudipta Kaviraj in the context of
nineteenth century Bengal, that for a viable alternative it was necessary
for the Bengali elite to forge a larger identity to oppose the mighty
coloniser, does not satisfactorily explain the situation in Karnataka.
First of all, what happened in Karnataka was not a gerrymandering
of the boundaries of ‘self’. For the Bengali elite, there was not much
of a difference between a Bengali ‘self’ and an Indian ‘self’ — only the
boundaries used to change but the content remained the same. But
our analysis has shown that in Karnataka, the boundaries of Kannada
and India were clearly demarcated and are two distinct identities
though they perceive a relationship between the two which are not
antagonistic but rather complementary. The task of imagining a
Kannada ‘self’ was carried out alongside with the construction of the
Indian ‘self’, and the task was far from over even in the middle of
the twentieth century. However, in Bengal, the question seems to have
been resolved in the nineteenth century itself.
By looking at the context of Karnataka, mainly Princely Mysore, and
Kannada literature, I would say that Kannada nationalism, though it
emerged and succeeded in imagining a Kannada community, could not
articulate itself in terms of a nation or a nation state for the geographic
region, which it identified as its own. Thus the peculiar situation in
which the region claimed by Kannada nationalism as its own was
caught up during the colonial period constrained the articulation
of Kannada nationalism. It could never articulate a nation state of
its own.
Competing Imaginations of Communities
This point of similarity, difference and relationship between Kannada
nationalism and Indian nationalism, which were imagining Kannada
and Indian communities respectively, begs another question. If there
were other communities, apart from Kannada and Indian being
imagined, or if old communities were re-imagining themselves in
the context of modernity, then what kind of relationship did these
communities have with Kannada nationalism and with Indian
nationalism? Though I have not taken up this question for detailed
examination, and although I am not competent to elaborate on this
issue, I wish to make a few tentative remarks.
Certain pre-colonial communities like the Lingayats were trying
to reshape the community in the context of modernity. I am not
suggesting here that this happened because these communities were
enumerated by the colonial state. Though it was the new historical
challenge/opportunity thrown up by the rapidly changing
sociopolitical
scenario brought about by colonialism and modernity that
might have been the driving force behind the new imagination that
was reshaping the community, it is not simply one of the colonial
state apparatus enumerating the existing caste/communities. Though
I would agree that these communities did try to align with the new
power (colonial state) that was emerging, it was not simply a case of
collaboration. I would rather see it as a community trying to re-imagine
itself in the context of the changed socioeconomic scenario. Any
community in order to survive has to reinvent its boundaries, content
and symbols in order to keep pace with the challenges thrown from
outside it. Moreover, a community might change itself because of the
dynamics of contradictions that exist within it or as a response to the
changes happening outside its fold. Many a times, the reshaping of
the communities would be the result of both these forces — internal
dynamics as well as external changes.
In the case of new communities, it is not just language and nation-
based communities that were emerging; other communities like the
backward classes were also emerging at this point of time. In Princely
Mysore, with the changed socioeconomic scenario, certain castes and
religions like Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Kuruba and Muslim, formed a
kind of alliance to push themselves towards modernity. This alliance
gave rise to a new community — the backward classes, at least in the
political sphere. In order to pressurise the state in Princely Mysore,
they formed a broad political base. There may not have been any
significant
corresponding cultural homogenisation that occurred with
this political alliance of these castes and religion. However, we can
say that at least this group behaved like a political community for
all practical purposes in its relation vis-à-vis the state and also the
Brahmins, who had garnered a majority of the positions in the state
machinery and the new institutions that were coming up in the context
of modernisation of Princely Mysore.6
It would be interesting to see what kind of relationship these other
communities which did not mark a new geographical region as their
own and claim ownership of it, had with the communities that were
marking a specific geographical region as their own and claiming its
ownership, such as the Kannada community and the Indian
community.As mentioned earlier, the backward class movement did
not favourably look upon the Indian national movement led by the
Congress, as it suspected it to be a part of ‘Brahmin conspiracy’. D. V.
Gundappa writes clarifying that nationalism in princely Mysore is not
a Brahmin conspiracy (Gundappa 1994). With regard to Kannada
nationalism, which was led mainly by the literati, the backward classes
had no role to play, though they were not hostile to the ideals of
Kannada nationalism. Here we are discussing as if these communities
were clearly demarcated from each other. However in reality, it is not
so; the Kannada community would encompass backward classes
and others within its fold. Indian community too would, at least in
definition, encompass backward classes in its fold. Or an individual of
the backward class, might believe in the discourse of Indian
nationalism
or Kannada nationalism. So the boundaries of these communities
were not mutually exclusive but overlapping/coexisting.
The Lingayat community, which was initially cold to the Indian
national movement and the Kannada movement, later on started
participating in both these movements. Likewise, later on towards
the end of 1930s, the backward class movement merged with the
Indian National Congress and actively participated in the struggle for
responsible government in Princely Mysore. Can we say then that the
discourse of nationalism (both Kannada and Indian) hegemonised
other discourses that were challenging it earlier? Or is it that these
communities thought that their entry into the nationalist movement
would alter the discourse and tilt it towards them?
If we look at how Kannada nationalism and Indian nationalism
responded to these communities, then that might also give us
some hint about the kind of relationship that they might have had.
Elsewhere I have tried to show, while analysing the canonisation of
B. M. Srikantia’s English Geetagalu, that the English-educated elite
which was in the forefront of the nationalist movement successfully
tried to coopt others into the movement by negotiating with these
communities through a discourse of Kannada literature and tradition
that would accommodate them (Tharakeshwar 2002). This brings us
to the question of what was the ‘Other’ that this dominant discourse
constructed for itself to fashion the nationalist self? Let me here also
look at the question of the ‘Other’ as discussed in some of the writings
on colonialism and nationalism in India.
Multiple 'Others' for Kannada 'Self'
If we look at the emergence of Kannada identity, a Kannadiga subject
position, as Alur Venkatarao recollects in his memoirs, it all started
when they went to study in Pune (Poona). Pune was the centre of
higher education for the people of today’s north Karnataka and coastal
Karnataka during those days. People who would generally identify
themselves when they are in their home town by community/caste
identities, are ascribed a more collective identity by the people of that
place, when they go out to a different place. The Marathi people started
calling people who had gone to Pune for higher studies from Karwar,
Bellary, Dharwad as ‘Kaanadiyappas’. Suddenly, people who thought
that they were different from each other in terms of caste/culture were
put together as being one on the basis of language. Thus when an
identity was ascribed to them, they took up that subject position and
constructed a discourse that would strengthen their position vis-à-vis
the perceived injustice inflicted on them by others. Thus the Kannada
‘self’ in today’s north Karnataka originated by keeping the Marathis
as the ‘other’. Similarly in Mysore in the 1890s and 1900, the ‘Mysore
for Kannadigas’ slogan came up as a response to a situation where
more and more Tamilians were taking up new government jobs.
Since 1881, the Princely Mysore had adopted new governing structures
like Legislative Assembly. In modern administrative structures, there
was a mass recruitment drive which benefited the people who were
educated in the European model. The people of Madras presidency,
especially Tamil Brahmins, had an advantage in this regard and
thus took up these positions. This resulted in demand for jobs in the
government for Kannada-speaking educated youth. Thus it was vis-à-vis
the Tamilians that a kind of Kannada solidarity emerged in Mysore
in late nineteenth century.
The British tried to refashion their ‘self’ when it encountered what
they perceived as ‘Indian culture’. In that process, it constructed an
‘other’ — ‘the Indian’ — in a manner which is well identified now
as Orientalist discourse. While doing so, it not only drew sustenance
from the resources that were available within Anglo-Saxon culture but
also from Greco-Roman resources. In the same way, the nationalist
elite in Princely Mysore drew not only from the resources available
in Kannada but also from Sanskrit by casting it as Indian and keeping
the west as the ‘other’. However, for construction of a ‘self’, the ‘other’
need not be a single one. A ‘self’ gets fashioned when it encounters
what it perceives as other cultures, and it need not always be a unitary
culture that it encounters. Scholars have also talked about how for
the nationalist ‘self’ in India, it was not just the west that was the
‘other,’ but also Muslims and so on.
 Javed Alam tries to show, by reading the late nineteenth century
Bengali texts of Bankimachandra and Vivekananda, that for the
modern Indian ‘self’, which was based on religion, the ‘other’ became
Islam as representing non-West, while they tried to prove that Hindu
religion was modern in its tenets (Alam 1999).7 In the poems of
B. M. Srikantia, we see how he hails Queen Britannia, the elder sister of
India, who came on request to rescue the nation which was dominated
by the ‘Muslima Kula’ (the clan of Muslims) by winning them over
and uniting the nation. Thus in the context of Mysore also, (though
not as overtly as in northern India) the nationalist discourse had
Muslims as the ‘other’, not to mention the translations of Galaganatha
from Marathi in north Karnataka, which explicitly depict Muslims
as villains.8 In fact, it is part of a common narrative that existed in
the nationalist writing in India to depict Muslim rule as an alien
rule. Sudipta Kaviraj, while talking about the depiction of Muslims
as villains in Bankimachandra’s fiction and Hindu kings as heroes
fighting them says, ‘These episodes can also be taken symbolically,
non-literally, in which case, of course, when he (Bankimachandra)
pointed his finger at the Muslim he may have actually meant the
British’ (1997: 319). Javed Alam refuses to read this as a stylistic device
of Bankimachandra or as a symbolic representation of the British
and says: ‘with the extended history of domination (extending to the
pre-colonial period), the foreigner now becomes not only the British
but also those, like Muslims, who had made India their home’ and
sees it as the construction of the Muslim as the ‘other’ in nationalist
discourse (1999: 104). In B. M. Srikantia, as we have seen, it is the
Muslim who is treated as an enemy and strangely the coloniser is seen
as an ally who helps in getting rid of this enemy. This is not to suggest
that the discourse fashioned by Srikantia — Kannada nationalist
discourse — does not have West as the ‘other’. What I am trying to
suggest here is that this discourse has multiple ‘others’. This point will
become clearer as we explore its implications further.
Sudipta Kaviraj talks about an external ‘other’ and an internal ‘other’
of modernity. He says that the external ‘other’ was the coloniser and
the internal ‘other’ was the metropolitan proletariat, while talking
about the understanding of the coloniser in the second stage of
nationalism (Kaviraj 1998: 326).9 Kaviraj also talks about a distinction
emerging between high and low culture. He is quick to point out
that this distinction ‘was no new thing in Indian History; but the
new distinction was not between high and low in the same register;
rather, it became two incommensurable registers resisting mutual
translation’ (Kaviraj 1997: 322). He further argues that Gandhi tried
to articulate his resistance in such a manner that it was intelligible in
both the registers though he did not ‘become the creator of a culture
of mutual translation’ (ibid.). With the standardisation of language,
a distinction between language of the people and the language of the
elite emerges within Kannada. And also we see that in the notion of
modern Kannada literature as conceived by B. M. Srikantia, a similar
distinction is posited between popularly read/listened (folk) texts
and the new literature that was emerging. So the modern ‘self’, that
was being fashioned then, not only had the coloniser and also the
Muslim as the ‘other’, but also other groups as the ‘other’. What
we see here are multiple ‘others’. Partha Chatterjee (1994) calls this
aspect of nationalism as elitist in its approach and calls the groups
that get constituted as internal ‘others’, as fragments left out of the
nation, when it arrived. It would be easy to reach the same conclusion
here that the ‘self’ that was fashioned in Kannada literature did not
include non-elite groups and they were relegated to being fragments
of the nation. However, I would not subscribe to this fully in the
context of Princely Mysore.
Politics of Space and Politics of Equal Rights
For example, the backward class was able to enter the institutions of
the modern state that were then emerging through a popular
movement.
So they can never be considered as mere fragments of a nation.
M. S. S. Pandian (1999), who has worked on a similar context in Tamil
Nadu where anti-Brahmin movement led by E. V. Ramaswamy was
prominent during the colonial period, says that the movement denied
any classical or Indian/Tamil past and was seeking equality — a
more democratic notion of citizenship than inventing a classical
past — which is why it was looking for a golden age in the future.
Perhaps the backward class movement in Mysore was also working
towards a similar goal and that is why, we don’t find them taking
recourse to literature to construct a glorious past.
Here it would be appropriate to mention the text by Swami Dharma
Theertha, History of Hindu Imperialism (1941), where he also constructs
a nationalist discourse that presents Brahmins as the ‘other’. So
I would not consider these groups, which were left out of the discourse
of nationalism, as evident in Kannada literature, as mere fragments of
a nation, or as subaltern groups without any voice. I would say that
they had an active agency which tried to configure the nation and the
state in a way that was different from the way the Brahmin elite was
configuring it. The context is not simply one of the coloniser versus the
colonised; it is the context of multiple discourses, each having multiple
‘others’. Here I would reiterate my earlier point that the discourses
produced by other non-nationalist or nationalist non-elite groups are
also translations of the colonial discourse. However, as they have a
different politics to perform and a different subject position to offer to
their subscribers, this translates into a discourse different from their
elitist counterparts. So these discourses and the attendant notions
of imagined communities gave way to a particular discourse which
was able to edge them out in the race for hegemony.

Conclusion
Thus though the competing notions of nationalisms and imagination
of communities have lost the battle for hegemony, they still keep
staging a comeback; they come back not to challenge the hegemony
of the Indian nation state or the states, which enshrine the language
nationalism but to change the contours of it. While addressing these
staging of comebacks, is essential to keep in mind not only the role
of contemporary socioeconomic, political compulsions/factors that
might trigger the staging but also the factor that these voices were
there even during the colonial days.
If there are challenges today for special status within a linguistic
state or new demands for new linguistic states or non-linguistic states,
all these are not just today’s imaginations — some of them at least have
their origin in pre-state reorganisation era. Some of these identities
were competing with the triumphant anti-colonial nationalism as
well as language-based nationalism during the colonial days for
hegemony but could not succeed in achieving it.

Notes
1. For a detailed analysis of this emergence of Kannada identity during the
nineteenth century, see Tharakeshwar (2005).
2. Utsavamoorthy is the idol that is taken out in procession from the temple
once a year or whenever there is a need, and represents the installed idol
that is in the temple. Here Venkatarao is using it to denote that the concrete
manifestation of the world to us is visible only in the notion of India, and in
 turn, the manifestation of the essence of India and access to that is possible
to us through Karnataka.
3. It is appropriate to probe what is meant by Kannada here. The appropriation
of Sanskrit texts or emergence of literature in Kannada in the nineth
century is not simply a story of Kannada versus Sanskrit but one of Jaina
religion trying to reach out to the aristocracy and mercantile class of the
Kannada-speaking regions. One of the strategies adopted by these writers
was to borrow from Vedic/Sanskrit literature and change it to suit either
the needs of their religion or the needs of their own time. Similarly in the
twelfth century, Veerashaiva religion used Kannada to reach out to the
artisan class in an oral form. However later, since the fifteenth century,
Brahmins have also used Kannada effectively to propagate both Bhakti
and Vedic traditions. So the pre-colonial relationship between Kannada
and Sanskrit is not a simple case of Kannada versus Sanskrit, where the
latter was hegemonic and the former was challenging that hegemony.
4. For the relationship between Hindi language nationalism and Hinduism,
see Rai (2002).
5. Sudipta Kaviraj (1998) has discussed this diglossia that prevailed in the
colonial period.
6. On the socio-political context of this period, see Chandrashekar (1985, 1995);
Manor (1977); Hetne (1978); Nair (1994).
7. Also see Pandey (1990) for the construction of ‘other’ in the context of
religious communities and communalism in colonial India.
8. For his complete collection of novels, see Galaganatha (1999).
9. The early phase is a kind of cultural nationalism, where the west is seen
as a single entity and the second phase is marked by the entry of Gandhi
and the knowledge derived from Marxism, indicating a refusal to consider
European modernity as a homogenous process.
Reference
Alam, Javed. 1999. India: Living With Modernity. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Chandrasekhar, S. 1985. Dimensions of Socio-Political Change in Mysore: 1918–1940.
Delhi: Ashis Publishing House.
———. 1995. Colonialism, Conflict and Nationalism — South India: 1857–1947.
Delhi: Wishwa Prakashana.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1987. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? London: Zed Books.
———. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dharma Theertha, Swami. 1992 (1941). History of Hindu Imperialism . Madras:
Dalit Educational Literature Centre.
Galaganatha, Venkatesha Tirako Kulakarni. 1999. Galaganatha Kadambari
Samputa (Complete Novels of Galaganatha), 6 vols. Hospet: Kannada
University Press.
Gundappa, D. V. 1994. Divigi Kriti Shreni (Complete Works of D. V. Gundappa),
10 vols, ed. H. M. Nayak. Bangalore: Department of Kannada and
Culture.
Hettne, Bjorn. 1978. Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947. London:
Curzon Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1997 (1995). ‘On the Structure of Nationalist Discourse’, in
T. V. Sathyamurthy (ed.), State and Nation in the Context of Social Change,
pp. 298–335. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1998 (1995). The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Kuvempu. 2000. Kuvempu Samagra Kaavya (Complete Poetry of Kuvempu),
vol.1, ed. K. C. Shivareddy. Hospet: Kannada University Press.
Manor, James. 1977. Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore 1917–1955.
Delhi: Manohar.
Nair, Janaki. 1994. ‘Contending Ideologies? The Mass Awakener’s Union and
the Congress in Mysore, 1936–1942’, Social Scientist, 22 (7/8): 42–63.
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. Construction of Communalism in Colonial India. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Pandian, M. S. S. 1999. ‘Nation from Its Margins: Notes on E. V. Ramaswamy’s
“Impossible” Nation’, in Rajeev Bhargava, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and
R. Sudarshan (ed.), Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, pp. 286–307.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rai, Alok. 2002 (2001). Hindi Nationalism. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
Srikantia, B. M. 1983. Sri Sahitya (Complete Collected works of B. M. Srikantia).
Mysore: Mysore University Press.
Thambanda, Vijay Pooncha. 2004. Conflicting Identities in Karnataka: Separate State
and Anti-State Movements in Coorg. Hospet: Kannada University Press.
Tharakeshwar V. B. 2002. ‘Colonialism, Nationalism and the “Question
of English” in Early Modern Kannada Literature’. Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Hyderabad.
———. 2005. ‘Translating Nationalism: The Politics of Language and
Community’, Journal of Karnataka Studies, 1 (1): 5–60.
Venkatarao, Alur. 1974. Nanna Jeevana Smritigalu. Dharawada: Manohara
Grantha Maala.
———. 1983 (1919). Karnataka Gata Vaibhava (Kannada — The Golden Past
of Karnataka). Bangalore: Directorate of Kannada and Culture.
———. 1999 (1957). Karnatakatvada Vikasa (Kannada — The Development
of Karnatakatva). Bangalore: Kannada Sahitya Parishat.
 Part IV
Culture and Identity:
Reorganisation in the East
and the North East
 9
Revisiting the States Reorganisation
Commission in the Context of Orissa
Nivedita Mohanty

India is a country with enormous diversities, and so are its various

regions that also demonstrate the principal characteristics of pluralism.
With an insight into the unique nature of the country, the States
Reorganisation Commission or SRC (1953–1956) was assigned the
responsibility of preparing a blueprint for a healthy federation on the
linguistic basis having a strong bond with the centre, thus upholding an
ideal image of India of unity in diversity. However while pondering
over the case of Orissa — when the dismembered Oriyas are seeking
support to secure their linguistic rights as minorities, when within
its political boundaries separatist activities are evident and when the
large tribal population is showing signs of restiveness — one wonders
whether a remapping on a new paradigm is desirable or perhaps
inevitable.
Fifty years after the SRC submitted its report, one observes that
numerous unresolved issues exist today, and are still emerging within
the federal units as well as in their relation with each other. It is worth
examining if the problems are unfolding due to inherent short comings
in the Commission’s recommendations or in their implementation or
because of both. The changing pattern of the society today has created
conditions that perhaps call for fresh guidelines in order to conform
to our desired goal — to hold the nation together through a successful
democracy where the equation between rights of individual self-
determination and the vision of nation building is free from conflict.
This chapter seeks to analyse the SRC in the context of the above
issues pertaining to Orissa. The study however warrants that the Oriya
movement of the nineteenth and twentieth century prior to the SRC
is placed in its perspective.
A Brief Outline of the Oriya Movement
The British occupied mainland Orissa in 1803. Earlier, in 1765 they had
taken over the north-eastern territories of Orissa under the Diwani of
 * Nivedita Mohanty

Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. In 1766, after the French had been defeated
and the Deccan Subedar had handed over the Northern Sircar to the
British, the region was placed with the Madras Province. The southern
Oriya-speaking tract, Ganjam, as a part of the Northern Sircar thus
remained with Madras. Western Orissa, including Sambalpur was
taken over in 1818 from the Marathas and was included in the Central
Provinces. Northern Orissa, i.e., Singhbhum and other adjoining areas
including Seraikella and Kharswan, remained in the Chotanagpur
Division under the Bengal province. In 1916, Seraikella and Kharswan
came under the Orissa group of princely states.
The mainland Orissa was divided into hill states and coastal area.
The hill states/princely states, with a large number of adivasi (the
tribal people) population under the jungle chiefs, enjoyed quasi-
independence through a separate contract entered into with the British.
Coastal Orissa, renamed Cuttack Division, was now included in the
Bengal Province.
As a result of this arrangement, Bengali-speaking people with their
earlier exposure to the British administration and education readily
found themselves suitable for appointment to various government posts
in Orissa. Acting as an intermediary between the British officials and
the local Oriyas, these employees were in an advantageous position
to enhance their influence in the land gradually and they seized this
opportunity for building up a sub-colony within a colony. Their desire
to establish a permanent suzerainty in the land of Orissa however
receiveda jolt when the spread of education produced a new class of
qualified Oriyas. A simple solution to this emerging threat from the
perspective of the Bengali overlords would be to declare the sons of
the soil also as Bengali by establishing that Oriya was not a distinct
language; it was only a dialect and a variant of Bengali. They would
therefore plead that the official language, the vernacular medium
of the schools, ought to be Bengali. Serious attempts were made in
executing this plan through publications, public meetings, in schools,
and also at personal and government levels by influencing key British
officials. This tactic however met with a strong retaliation from the
Oriyas. Known as the Language Agitation, it galvanised efforts from
all over Orissa and snowballed into a strong voice against this move.
Eventually, the intended annihilation of the Oriya language was fully
thwarted. The Language Agitation in its wake led to the promotion
of the language, literature, education, press, journalism, and in short,
a regenerated Orissa appeared on the horizon. Fifty years before
Gandhiji conceived of the provincial division of the Congress on
 Revisiting the States Reorganisation Commission *

the linguistic basis in 1920, Orissa had thus fought to consolidate its
linguistic identity.
The movement for protecting the language and culture took birth
in the heartland of Orissa and spread rapidly to the Oriya-speaking
areas scattered in other provinces (Mohanty 2005). In all these places,
systematic plans had been made to replace Oriya by respective main
languages of the provinces; this played havoc on the socioeconomic
traditions of these forced diaspora. It was realised that the exploitation
they were subjected to as minorities in all those larger provinces
would be stopped only if these outlying areas were amalgamated with
mainland Orissa. The next stage of the movement was thus for a united
Orissa under one of the existing provinces. The demand for separation
came later. The agitation in Sambalpur in the late nineteenth century
resulted in its union with Orissa in 1905. The Utkala Sammilani,
founded in 1903, quickly commanded the stature of the national
assembly of the Oriyas and fought for reinforcing the movement in an
organised manner. The Bihar–Orissa Province was created in 1912.
The creation of a separate province for the Oriya-speaking people
materialised in 1936. However, many areas which were perceived as
genuine Oriya-speaking tracts continued to stay outside the province.
Consequently, on the eve of the formation of the province there was
a fierce controversy in Orissa regarding whether a truncated unit was
at all acceptable as the foremost goal of the Oriya movement was the
unification of all Oriya-speaking territories. The amalgamation versus
separation debate yielded nothing except sharpening the emotional
and political split among its leaders. This schism had had been present
since 1920 when the two sides differed in their views with regard to
prioritising the regional and national issues. Nevertheless, the anguish
of remaining separated continued among Oriyas of all groups and it
provided a fillip for the unification movement even after the province
came into being.
The frustration of remaining scattered heightened during 1948–1949
when the princely states of Orissa were merged with the province but
the two important states of Seraikella and Kharswan were handed
over to Bihar.
The States Reorganisation Commission
and the Oriya Movement
In December 1953, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appointed the
SRC to prepare for the creation of states on linguistic lines. The formation
of the SRC with a thrust on language excited the Oriya-speaking people
all over the country. The Oriya movement resurfaced with a new hope
of accomplishing the unification goal. The response and reaction in
Orissa vis-à-vis SRC passed through various phases.
The initiative to create awareness among the people, especially in the
outlying Oriya-speaking tracts, was taken by the Utkala Sammilani.
The Sammilani sought to strengthen its status of a national forum for
the Oriyas. Within two weeks of the formation of the SRC, the Utkala
Sammilani treasurer and the ex-chief of Kalahandi Pratap Kesori
Deo, who was also the Member of the Orissa Legislative Assembly,
appealed through the newspapers for donations to the Desa Misrana
Fandi (Amalgamation Fund) that had been formed to work towards
the fulfillment of the aspirations of the Oriyas. The Utkala Sammilani
redefined its focus and the modus operandi. It sought the cooperation
of all parties and groups in Orissa in order to carry forward the Oriya
aspiration. The movement per se was to be taken forward through
constitutional means and a well documented representation was to
be prepared for the SRC. Regarding its demand for the dismembered
tracts, the Utkala Sammilani decided to draw special attention to the
former princely states of Seraikella and Kharswan.1 The president
of the Sammilani was also the chief of Ganatantra Parishada, a new
party, comprising primarily the former rulers of the princely states.
Ganatantra Parishada was a major opposition party in the provincial
legislature. The timing of the foundation of the SRC came in handy
for this party to establish its own credibility in Orissa. It identified
its political goal with the amalgamation cause. At this stage of the
movement, the Utkala Sammilani indeed became the forum where
all parties including the ruling one, and people from all segments of
the society joined whole heartedly.
Meanwhile, the formation of the Utkala Sammilani at the district
and branch levels in Orissa and in the Oriya-speaking outlying tracts
had begun. Even on the eve of the formal appointment of the SRC, the
secretary of the Utkala Sammilani chaired a meeting on 27 December
1953 held at the Sasana Sahi in the Srikakulam district, which was
beyond the southern border of Orissa. Representatives from all over
the district came and a 40-member branch committee of the Utkala
Sammilani was formed. It however decided to meet soon to chalk out
its campaigning strategy.2
Sensitive to such activities of the Utkala Sammilani, the people
opposedto the cause of the Oriyas in the neighbouring provinces reacted.
The Andhra Mahasabha Boundary Committee member Sanyasi Rao
stated that Koraput and Ganjam, the two southern districts of Orissa,
belonged to Andhra.3 The Chief Minister of Bihar Srikrishna Sinha
complained during the Congress Working Committee meeting at
Congress Nagar in Kalyani on 23 January 1954 that the activities of
the Congress leaders from Orissa, including Harekrishna Mahtab
and Radhanath Rath, had created tension in Bihar which needed to
be stopped immediately.4 On 20 January 1954, the chief minister of
Madhya Pradesh during his visit to Sambalpur in connection with the
Hirakud Dam project, told the press that the border territorial issues
could be resolved only by mutual agreement between the concerned
parties. He pointed out that Madhya Pradesh had also some claims
on other provinces.5
Thus, the grievances due to the territorial divisions and distribution
among the provinces in eastern India had not disappeared with the
country attaining its independence. Claims for territory by provinces
had figured prominently during and after the election of 1952. Bengal
celebrated the greater Bengal Day on 24 December 1952. They also
held the Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan at Cuttack where the
following lyric was sung:
Banglar Mati Ek Hoe Geche Utkal Simanaya …
Banga Tahar Anga Misala Baitaranir Jale.6
(the land of Bengal has joined the border of Orissa …
Bengal has mingled herself in the water of Baitarani).

These words raised an apprehension in the minds of the Oriyas as it

articulated Bengal’s claim for Mayurbhanj and north Balasore from
Orissa. The river Baitarani that flowed through north Orissa had these
regions on the northern side of it. If the Bengal border touched the
river Baitarani, these region of Orissa would obviously be included in
Bengal. Bengal also claimed Manbhum, Santal Parganas, portions of
Purnea and Dhalbhum (East Singhbhum) from Bihar and suggested
that the rest of Singhbhum might go to Orissa. Bihar retaliated by
proclaiming that not a single grain of dust would be given to Bengal;
instead Bengal ought to transfer the south Medinipur to Orissa.7
Bengal and Orissa’s claim on any territory from Bihar was refuted
(Sahaya 1952).
In the south of Orissa, the Union Labour Minister V. V. Giri came
to Berhampur to campaign for the transfer of Berhampur to Andhra.
The Telugu-speaking people in their agitation for a separate province
of Andhra proposed that the River Rushikulya be made the natural
boundary line between Andhra and Orissa; this would imply Orissa
losing a large portion of its territory.8
In the Assembly sessions in Orissa following the election of 1952,
Godavaris Misra, the stalwart of the Oriya movement in the 1920s
and 1930s and now representing the Gantantra Parishad, raised the
issue of outlying Oriya-speaking tracts. He suggested that a strong
resolution be passed articulating Orissa’s demand on Seraikella
and Kharswan. It was proposed that the state government of Orissa
move the Supreme Court of India in a suit under Article 131 of the
Constitution of India. An expert opinion from the judiciary in Orissa
was sought in this connection and when it was pointed out that for such
a move, the request of the Government of Orissa needed to be made
to the President of India,9 the idea was dropped. Since the President
Dr Rajendra Prasad himself hailed from Bihar, the apprehension was,
the representation would be a fruitless effort. The general feeling,
also hyped by the media, voiced slogan that grave injustice had been
done to Orissa for which Mahtab, who was the Premier of Orissa
during the transfer of Seraikella and Kharswan to Bihar, was largely
responsible. To quote a few lines from a poem ‘What have I done?’
published in a journal in Orissa:10
I handed over Orissa to Andhra,
Sold Singhbhum to Bihar,
Offered Bastar at the feet of Shukla (the then Chief Minister of MP).

With the feeling that the unjust provincial boundaries needed to be

realigned in order to preserve the language, culture and the historical
connection, the Oriya movement took off undeterred by the
competitive
reactions of its neighbouring provinces. However, the most
painful memory that continued to haunt the Oriyas was the loss of
Seraikella and Kharswan. The unfeasibility of seeking their transfer
through any legal procedure disturbed them further. The prime
attention of the Oriya movement henceforth was directed towards
these two former princely states. At this point, some support from
Bengal could be garnered for this cause. ‘Orissa’s claim of Seraikella
and Kharswan was justified’ said some editors and journalists from
Calcutta and promised to support Orissa’s case. A luncheon meeting
at the Grand Hotel on 5 February 1954 was arranged by Dr Kalidas
Nag, Member of Parliament. He had asked Surendra Mohanty, who
was also a Member of Parliament, to provide a comprehensive picture
of Orissa vis-à-vis Singhbhum and Seraikella and Kharswan, to the
leading newspapers of Bengal.11
Seraikella and Kharswan in Troubled Waters
The federal branch of the Utkala Sammilani in Singhbhum known as
the Singhbhum Utkala Sammilani organised a series of public meetings
to give direction to the Oriya movement in this region.
A public meeting was called under the auspices of the Singhbhum
Sammilani at Seraikella on 7 February 1954. R. N. Singh Deo,
who was the president of the Utkala Sammilani and the Member of
Parliament from the Ganatantra Parishad, came to preside over the
regional meeting. He was to join the birthday celebrations of his
younger brother, late Subhendra Narayan, who was a great Chhau
dance exponent. Singh Deo was the second son of the former ruler of
Seraikella and had gone over to Bolangir–Patna as the adopted son
of his maternal uncle. He was accompanied to this meeting by the
Kalahandi Maharaja, Pratap Keshari Deo who was the deputy leader
of the opposition in the Orissa Assembly. Godavaris Misra also came
along to this meeting with Shyam Sundar Misra, who was a member
of the Servants of India Society. There were many young leaders from
Orissa and from different parts of Singhbhum and Dhalbhum who
participated in this meeting.
R. N. Singh Deo in his address on 7 February requested the people to
work devotedly for the amalgamation movement and exhorted them
to articulate their case strongly before the Commission. However,
halfway through the meeting there were disturbances and violence was
unleashed on the congregation, and the attack mainly being directed
towards the dignitaries from Orissa. Godavaris fell down, and the
Kalahandi Maharaja along with several others were severely injured
and needed immediate medical care. The subsequent meetings of the
Sammilani at Gamharia, Rajnagar, Seraikella and Kharswan had to
be called off. Messages were wired to the President, Prime Minister,
Home Minister and to all the prominent newspapers as well as to the
governors and chief ministers of Bihar and Orissa on 8 February 1954
to the effect that:
The inhabitants of this area cannot represent their case freely before the
States Reorganisation Commission unless the area is brought under the
administration of the Union Government and the people are vouchsafed
those conditions of freedom under which alone would it be possible for
the citizens of this area to represent their case.12
 The incident invited all-round condemnation. The Parliament
Member Lanka Sundaram criticised the happening at Seraikella and
said that ‘the SRC was not a Boundary Commission; it was an
investigating
Commission. The Government of India ought to protect the
witnesses
so that they submit their impartial and independent views’. 13
Parliamentarians including Sucheta Kripalini and N. C. Chatterjee
of Bengal wrote to the Prime Minister criticising Bihar’s conduct in
Seraikella, Kharswan as well as in Manbhum. 14 Sambalpur observed an
all-party protest meeting on 14 February, Sunday at Balibandhaghata
where Sraddhakar Supakar, the then opposition leader of the Orissa
Assembly, presided. Supakar proposed that the Government of India
enquireinto the incident of 7 February and should unite Seraikella and
Kharswan with Orissa as early as possible. He said that Bihar’s rule
over Seraikella was like the British rule on gun point. ‘The 7/2 incident
in Seraikella was an insult to the Oriyas’, wrote the Oriya daily The
Samaja. As an expression of strong protest several leaders including
politicians, educationists, lawyers, journalists and doctors held a public
meeting at Cuttack on 18 February which was attended by 10,000
people.15 The outcry was against the assault and the humiliation
suffered at the Seraikella meeting and the feeling expressed was that
the union of Seraikella and Kharswan needed to be done forthwith,
and that this did not require any recommendation from the SRC.
Around this time, the Bihar chief minister made a statement in the
Bihar Assembly on 15 February 1954 to the effect that the violence
at the Seraikella meeting was incited by the hooligans brought along
by the organisers of the Sammilani.16 R. N. Singh Deo referred to the
Bihar chief minister’s version as ‘partisan and propagandist’. A
booklet
entitled, ‘Rape of Democracy’ was prepared by him with detailed
accounts and photographs of the happenings at Seraikella and was
distributed among the Members of the Parliament.
As a rejoinder to the statements made by Singh Deo, a monograph
on ‘Facts of Seraikella and Kharswan’ was prepared by Baldev Sahay,
President, Bihar Association, that countered the justification of the
Oriya claim for the de-merger of Seraikella and Kharswan. Referring
to the incident of 7 February, he wrote, ‘Whatever the truth might
be, the significance of what took place is clear, i.e., the pro-merger is
led from outside, and that the local people were out to frustrate the
stage-shows and maneuvers of the Oriya pro-mergers.’17
The chief of Seraikella wrote to the Home Minister K. N. Katju
about this incident and requested him to set up an enquiry committee
to investigate into the anti-Oriya campaign by the Bihar government. 18
Demonstrations and protest meetings were held by students in schools
and colleges all over Orissa, by the Sammilani members at different
places and also by various Oriya Associations even in the remote
villages
in Orissa and in dismembered tracts. The protests from the Oriya
quarters against Bihar’s machinations to quash the Oriya movement
became increasingly loud and clear.
Language and Literature: Interest and Conflict
Reconstructing the boundaries of the federal units on language basis
was the focus of the SRC. To impress the SRC about one’s linguistic
identity and the desired geographical outline thereof often led to
conflicts between ambitious groups, and on occasions literature became
a vehicle of confrontation. For instance, Debaki Nandan Sarma, who
was a famed writer and an officer in the Education Department of
Bihar, compiled a book of 76 rural lyrics of Seraikella and Kharswan
entitled Seraikella Kharswan ke Gramyagit (the village songs of Seraikella
and Kharswan) which was published from Patna. The compiler in
the 16-page preface interpreting the grammar, the meaning and the
essence of the words and of the lyrics which were Oriya lyrics said
that they were closer to Hindi, Bhojpuri and Magadhi. The Samaj
dated 1 April 1954 quotes him:
immigrant Oriyas from Orissa including the royalty speak among
themselves in mixed Oriya; the employees of Tisco even speak in
broken Hindi. The adivasis speak Hindi while communicating with
non-adivasis. Even the queens of the royalty who came from the western
regions speak Hindi. So in the Seraikella tradition the queen’s language
is Hindi (Ranibhasa or queen’s language as opposed to the Rajbhasa
or the mother tongue of the ruler, the king/the official language of
his state).
He added that Seraikella and Kharswan represent an amalgam of Arya
and non-Aryan traditions and attributed the harmony to the efforts of
the Kudmi Mahatos. As a rejoinder to the writings of Sarma, Raghunath
Purohit from Wardha wrote in his article entitled, ‘The Attack on the
Oriya Language and Literature’ that Hindi was being thrust as the
national
language, Hindi hegemony was intending to obliterate the
existence
of the Oriya language in the border areas.19 Udayanath Bhuyan
wrote from Ganjam that these lyrics were sung in the villages in Orissa
and also in the dismembered Oriya areas in the south such as Tarala,
Tikali, Manjusa and were not influenced by the Hindi language. With
regard to Telugu, one faculty member of Puri College was criticised
in the public meeting at Sambalpur for writing an article in the college
magazine to the effect that Telugu ought to be introduced in the entire
territory beyond the southern border of Puri.
Significantly, an outcome of this apparently trivial language war
was the extent of attention that Oriya language and literature started
receiving around this time. The literary activities were enhanced.
Public meetings and birthday celebrations were held to
commemorate
the contributions of literary giants such as Phakirmohan Senapati
and Gangadhar Meher. Rich and early literary traditions of Orissa in
the writings of Adikabi Sarala Das and Upendra Bhanja were
remembered in the form of literary sessions by the littérateurs of Orissa.
There was a spurt in publication of literary journals with creative
writers enriching all aspects of literature through their writings. At this
time (1955), the Oriya novel Amrutara Santana by Gopinath Mohanty
received the Sahitya Akademy award. Literary meetings were held to
celebrate this event.
There was also great interest and discussion on the Oriya script and
its improvisation. The government decided to use Oriya as the official
language as early as possible and initiatives were launched to
introduce
the Oriya typewriter. The Utkala Dibas, the anniversary of the
formation of the Orissa province (1 April) was celebrated with much
enthusiasm in 1954. The newspapers and the journals published special
articles, including those from the Oriyas living outside the state, on the
occasion. It was essentially another phase of the Oriya Nationalism
when Orissa’s cultural heritage was revisited focusing on the strong
linguistic identity and the historical connection of mainland Orissa
with its dismembered tracts. Literary sessions were also conducted
by eminent writers from Orissa in the outlying Oriya tracts.
On 13 April 1954, on the occasion of Visuba Milana which is a
literary
meet held every year at Cuttack during the time of the new year
according to the solar calendar and which is organised by the Oriya
daily The Prajatantra, eminent scholar and linguist from Bengal
Dr Suniti Kumar Chhottopadhyay was invited to grace the occasion. In
his address, he said that the Oriya language was the elder sister of Bengali
language. It maintained its unique originality without being diluted.
He also discussed at length about the greatness of Upendra Bhanja and
Adikabi Sarala Das and appreciated Phakirmohan’s command over
the language which he said needed to be emulated.20 The words of
Dr Chottopadhyay were in sharp contrast to the address of Dr R. L.
Mitra in 1868 which had sparked off the Language Agitation in Orissa.
The Aspiration for Amalgamation of the
Oriya-Speaking People
Orissa being the first linguistic state in the country, there was a sense
of euphoria in Orissa which symbolised the fact that Orissa was
the example of the framework which was sought to be replicated
through the SRC. It was firmly believed that the Commission would
also rectify the past mistakes with regard to Orissa’s boundaries
(Map 9.1). Thus, in spite of the experience of 7 February, the hope
Map 9.1: Map of Orissa and Various Outlying Oriya-speaking Areas

Source: The Samaj, 1 April 1954.

was not lost for accomplishing the amalgamation, especially of
Seraikella and Kharswan.
At this juncture, when written representations and petitions were
prepared in Orissa and sent to the Commission followed by the
Commission’s visit and interviews, the neighbouring provinces —
Bengal and Bihar — also started seriously working out their respective
strategy for consolidating their claims on Orissa as well as on each
other’s territory.
For Bihar, it was not an easy time either. Jaipal Singh Munda had
brought the adivasi politics to the fore at the national level. Through
his Jharkhand Party, he thundered for the unification of the adivasi
lands spread in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Madhya
Pradesh and the creation of a separate province of Jharkhand. It would
mean Bihar losing its southern territory either with the formation
of the Jharkhand province, or a large chunk of it with Orissa taking
away Seraikella, Kharswan and the Singhbhum Sadar. Bengal placed
its claim on a portion of Bihar’s eastern territory. Bihar was however
hardly willing to concede to any of those claims. Instead, it demanded
Darjeeling, Malda, Dinajpur from Bengal and the two former princely
states of Gangapur and Bonai from Orissa in its memorandum to the
Commission.
Bengal appeared to support Orissa’s cause against Bihar. This had
also been attempted during the period of merger in 1948–1949 with an
eye on Tisco. Taking advantage of Orissa’s emotional commitment to
Seraikella and Kharswan that was heightened by the recent occurrence
of 7 February, Bengal now extended its hands of cooperation to Orissa
with the obvious intention of preventing any claim for the transfer of
Medinipur to Orissa and seeking its support eventually for annexing
Dhalbhum to Bengal. In order to work out a mutual understanding
regarding the territories between Bengal and Orissa, the Bengal
Provincial Congress Committee president Atulya Ghosh came to Puri
for a discussion with the Orissa Congress on 30 April and 1 May 1954.
It was agreed upon that in their respective representations to the SRC,
they would not claim any territory from each other.21
A memorandum from the Government of Orissa was sent to the
SRC in May 1954, which was prepared by Radhanath Rath, the then
Minister of Finance, Education and Welfare. 22 The demands excluded,
as per the agreement with Bengal Congress, the Oriya-speaking areas
from Bengal. The Utkal Congress Committee’s separate memorandum
was also in line with that of the Government of Orissa.
 The Utkala Sammilani, in its five-language memorandum on the
other hand, included areas such as Jhargram, Kharagpur, Narayanganj,
Dantun, Mohanpur, Nandigram, Tamluq, etc., from Bengal. The
claims for the Oriya-speaking areas from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and
in the south from Andhra Pradesh, that was in the making, were the
same as those presented by the Government of Orissa and the Orissa
Congress. The President of the Utkala Sammilani R. N. Singh Deo
enclosed a personal letter and also a copy of the resolution passed on
25 October 1953 in the Utkala Sammilani session held at Manjusa.
There was apprehension in Orissa that as in retaliation to the act
of Utkala Sammilani, the Bengal Congress would now demand
north Balasore, Mayurbhanj, Dhalbhum and also Seraikella and
Kharswan. The Samaj, dated 27 May 1954, wrote that the Utkala
Sammilani’s claim was justified considering the historical, linguistic
and cultural connections of these territories with Orissa; nevertheless
as the agreement was made in the Puri meeting between the Congress
leaders from Bengal and Orissa in the presence of R. N. Singh Deo and
apparently with his consent, the change of stand by the Sammilani
was not in the right spirit.
The Ganatantra Parishad submitted its memorandum to the SRC
on 22 May 1954. The memorandum entitled, ‘The Case for Transfer of
the District of Singhbhum to Orissa’ gave a comprehensive picture of
Orissa’s historical, geographical, and cultural connection with
Singhbhum. Commenting on the O’Donnell Committee’s (1932)
decision
the note read, ‘We are constrained to observe that the Committee
was prejudiced against the Oriya claim and approached the question
with its own predilections and thus was instrumental to an unjust
vivisection of Oriya land.’ The demand now included in the
memorandumwas for the integration of the entire Singhbhum district with
Orissa province. As regards the tribal population, it pointed out that
in Orissa the tribes accounted for 25 per cent of the tribal population
after the integration of the princely states with Orissa, whereas in
Bihar they constituted only 13.91 per cent. Separating Singhbhum
from Bihar and ceding it to Orissa therefore would not be against the
interest of the tribal people as had been concluded by the O’Donnell
Committee. In case of Dhalbhum, if interested parties were unwilling
to part with it because of the industrial town of Jamshedpur, then
at least the southern region of Dhalbhum which was entirely Oriya
speaking, should be transferred to Orissa.23
 A host of memoranda from various associations and individuals
were also despatched. The historical document of the ruling Singh
family in Singhbhum and its connection with Orissa were elaborately
dealt with by Tikayet N. N. Singh Deo (1954) in ‘Singhbhum,
Seraikella and Kharswan Through Ages’ with a foreword by the
eminent historian and the Member of Parliament Dr Radha Kumud
Mookerji, and was sent to the Commission. Of significance was the
independent memorandum submitted by Nilankantha Das, a great
scholar and one of the frontline leaders of the Oriya movement and
of the Orissa Congress. His interview with the O’Donnell Committee
would have made a difference with regard to Singhbhum. He was
however unable to avail this opportunity because the Committee had
been boycotted by the Congress. He presented a copy of the same
memorandum now to the SRC.24
The members of the Singhbhum District Board passed a resolution
for including Singhbhum, Seraikella and Kharswan with Orissa and
Dhalbhum with Bengal, and sent the same to the SRC. The Dhalbhum
Oriyas however vehemently opposed this suggestion.
The Oriyas at the Changudi Sasana, which was in Andhra, held
a meeting and resolved that as the Changudi Sasana village and six
maujas (groups of villages) around were Oriya-dominated area they
were to be included with Orissa; a representation was sent to the
Commission accordingly.25
With the written representations already sent, there were serious
preparations now to influence the people to articulate their views in
front of the Commission during the interviews. The campaigning in the
dismembered Oriya tracts was taken up with intensity by the mainland
Oriyas, the Utkala Sammilani and the local leaders. The focus was
however on the Singhbhum Sadar and Seraikella and Kharswan.
A delegation of journalists from Orissa visited Seraikella and
Jamshedpur between 10–18 June 1954 in order to asses the exact
situation
when news started arriving about the anti-Oriya movement in
these outlying areas in Bihar. 26 The first thing they reported during their
field studies was that the Oriyas in Singhbhum were not allowed to
be Congress members by the Bihar Provincial Congress Committee,
which denied their access to the higher authorities of the Congress.
They also reported that in Seraikella, Hindi was being forced on all
Oriya schools. The middle and high schools were shifted to the areas
where Bihari officials lived. Many schools were closed down. Five-
hundred Oriya employees were dismissed without any compensation
and cultural centres were destroyed. For example, one of the cultural
centres the Ajaya Club was taken over and the funds of about one
lakh rupees of Srikalapitha were seized. The Bijoylakshmi Kalapitha
was founded as the competitor institution which was supported
by the government. The Bihar government began the government-
supported Chhau (a mask dance) festival as the Chhau Mahotsava,
thus attempting to isolate and marginalise the royalty and the age
old royal tradition. The high profile Oriyas were falsely implicated in
litigation and mercenaries from Chaibasa and Jamshedpur were hired
to disturb meetings organised by Oriyas. The signature campaign by
the Oriyas was thwarted. Two persons in the Handibhanja village
for instance, who were conducting a signature campaign, were
terrorised. The memorials, letters and appeals from Oriyas to the SRC
Commission were not allowed to go out. Every communication
with outside was scrutinised. The Bihar government constituted two
advisory committees to help people to face the SRC. The members
nominated were all Biharis. The adivasis were pressurised to go against
Orissa. To impress upon the SRC the cultural and linguistic changes in
Seraikella and Kharswan, the Oriya names and even the writings on
the epitaphs were erased or replaced by Hindi. The people were scared
to come out of their home after 10 pm. Oriya agitators put in jails in
Bihar were tortured. They were made to sleep on ice and thrashed.
The common song in Seraikella during these days was:27
Sunlo Odia Sunlo Bangali
Bihar ka Sauwal
Mazfarpurka lathi Mungher ka Barccha
Patna ka Talwar
(Listen O’ Odia Listen O’ Bengali
Bihar’squestion/proposition
Muzafarpur’s stick Munger’s spear
Patna’ssword)

The confrontation between Orissa and Bihar in southern Bihar had

always focused on winning over the adivasi support, the reason
being that in the adivasi regions the Oriya-speaking people formed
the second majority, next only to the adivasis. However, Orissa had
a major disadvantage vis-à-vis Bihar as the administrative machinery
of the Bihar government could influence the adivasis and neutralise
the Oriya movement. In addition, the Jharkhand movement under the
charismatic leadership of Jaipal Singh Munda was exploited by Bihar
in thwarting the credibility of Orissa’s claim in southern Bihar.
 Orissa decided to use its own adivasi strength for countering the
anti-Oriya movement and thwart Jaipal’s claim on the territories from
Orissa. The All Utkal Adivasi Congress was founded in 1951. Sonaram
Soren of Mayurbhanj, who had led the agitation against the merger of
Mayurbhanj with Orissa in 1949 and was arrested, worked in tandem
with Jaipal Singh and the Adivasi Mahasabha. After his release, he
went into hiding in Ranchi with the intention of starting his agitation
all over again from outside Orissa. The Government of Orissa sent
feelers to him requesting him to return home and join politics where
he would have a great scope to work for the adivasis. Sonaram Soren
returned to Orissa, got elected in 1952 and was offered a berth in the
ministry (Routray 1986: 78–80). The plan was to weaken the Jharkhand
movement in Orissa and also to attract the adivasis of Singhbhum
who thought their counterparts were better off in Orissa. Soren led
the All Utkal Adivasi Congress meetings in all the northern and
northwestern regions of Orissa and soon became a powerful voice
and an icon of the adivasis in this region.
A series of public meetings and demonstrations were organised to
influence the adivasis. On the eve of one such meeting at Rairungpur
on 9 July 1954 for instance, a big procession was led by Sonaram
Soren with the slogans ‘Singhbhum to be amalgamated with Orissa’,
‘Singhbhum is an inseparable part of Orissa’.28 When Jaipal arrived
to attend a meeting in Rajgangpur the next day, he was shown black
flag with the slogans ‘we do not want Jharkhand’, ‘the Bihar agent and
the Missionary agent Jaipal go back’. ‘Utkala Mataki Jai, Jai Utkala
and Jai Adivasi’ were other slogans which accompanied anti-Jaipal
slogans.29 Sonaram Soren wrote an article in The Samaj dated 24 July
1954 titled, ‘Why should the Adivasis of Singhbhum Integrate with
Orissa?’. He wrote that a large number of similar tribes of Singhbhum
and having the same common language, also lived in Orissa. In
language,
traditions, culture, food, lifestyle, dress and in rites and rituals
the adivasis of Singhbhum were the same as their counterparts in
Orissa. He cited numerous examples of the Oriya and the adivasi
interdependence. He quoted the Ho leader Dolmanki who had written
to Gopabandhu Das in 1920 that the adivasis of Singhbhum were
similar to Oriyas in their dress and rituals and traditionally enjoyed
a close bond. They did not have any cultural connection with the
Biharis and Bengalis. Sonaram added that the mother tongue of the
Bhuyan and the Gond was Oriya. In rural Singhbhum, the Bengalis
or the Biharis were not seen, he added.
 There were articles by scholars and historians, including that of
Kedarnath Mohapatra, that Orissa was referred to as Jharkhand in
medieval literature. Soren gave the statement that indeed Jharkhand
could be an integral part of Orissa: ‘If an effort was made to take an
inch from Orissa towards a separate Jharkhand, it would be resisted
with the last drop of blood’, he said in a general meeting at Baripada. 30
Jaipal was accused of paying attention to the interests of Bihar and
of other non-adivasi elements. Five adivasi members of the Bihar
Legislative Assembly voted for joining Orissa. They were suspended
from the Jharkhand Party.
With the indication that adivasis of Singhbhum were tilting towards
Orissa, the Kudmis were approached to support the cause of Bihar.
One government official was appointed to carry on the anti-Oriya
campaign with a booklet named ‘Odisa Kabua’ (Odisa not needed),
which said that no power on earth would take away Singhbhum from
Bihar.31 The Oriya paper also reported that Bihar was trying to collect
signatures from the people of Singhbhum against Orissa under duress.
In Kolhan, forms were distributed in Hindi which the Hos did not read
and some of their leaders were influenced to collect the signatures.32
One of the anti-Oriya meetings held at Kuchei village in Kharswan
on 6 December 1954 was chaired by the adivasi leader Sadhu Charan
Soy. In that meeting, Oriya businessman Jagadish Prasad Sahu and
the Kharswan prince Yuvraj Singh criticised Orissa’s expansionist
policy. They resolved to protest against Orissa’s claim on Seraikella and
Kharswan and demanded Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar from Orissa.33
In February 1955, the Commission went to meet the people in
different
parts of Singhbhum before coming to Orissa. They went from
Chaibasa to Kharswan and Seraikella on 8 February. During this
period, attempts were made by officials from Bihar to prevent the pro-
Oriya group from coming and meeting the Commission. However,
most of the associations/fraternities, including the Singhbhum Utkala
Sabha, Singhbhum Utkala Congress, Kharswan Praja Mandal,
Singhbhum Tanti Sabha, and Chakradharpur Municipality appeared
at the interviews. Individual interviews of the chiefs of Seraikella and
Kharswan with the Commission also took place. The Kharswan chief
was reportedly against joining Orissa.
Tarapad Sarangi and Mrutyunjay Das were the eminent leaders
from Dhalbhum who met the Commission in Jamshedpur. They
pointed out that Bengal had no right over any part of Singhbhum.
On 13 and 14 February 1955, the Commission met representatives
from various groups such as the Utkala Sammilani, Utkal Pradesh
Congress Committee, Parliament Members, Ganatantra Parishad,
Hind Sevaka Samaj, Communist Party, women representatives and
representatives from the Madhya Pradesh at Cuttack. Government
representatives included Radhanath Rath and Sonaram Soren.34 The
Commission visited south Orissa on 18 February where they met the
adivasis who gave their views in favour of Orissa. Utkala Sammilani
and the Utkala Hitaishini Samaj appealed for the return of the extensive
Oriya-speaking territory which was still in Andhra.
Discontent yet Hope for a Change
The SRC report was released in October 1955. It sent shock waves
throughout the Oriya-speaking world. The report did not have anything
to offer to Orissa; in particular, Seraikella and Kharswan remained
where they were. Surendra Mohanty, a Member of Parliament, brought
a copy of the report to Cuttack and set it on fire in a public meeting
held at the Sriramchandra Bhavan (Supakar 1982: 209).
The Chief Minister Nabakrushna Choudhury stated in the Orissa
Assembly that the recommendations of the SRC were a great threat
to Orissa. The Orissa Assembly also expressed its formal disapproval
and requested the central government for reconsideration. One and
a half lakh copies of the chief minister’s address were printed at the
Rashtrabhasa Press at Cuttack and were distributed.35
A memorandum on the SRC report with reference to Seraikella,
Kharswan and Singhbhum was prepared and submitted to the
Government of India by Pattayat Bhupendra Narayan Singh Deo of
Seraikella in November 1955. The 10-page memorandum along with
a map and census figures from 1920 to 1940 says that the opinion of
SRC with regard to Seraikella, Kharswan and Singhbhum ‘does not
spring from any logic but is fallacious. From wrong premises they
have drawn wrong conclusions and tried to justify wrong decisions
by dubious logic’ (Singh Deo 1955). Moving a motion in the Lok Sabha,
R. N. Singh Deo said on 23 December 195536:
The SRC Report is more political than judicious. Its chief characteristics
are lack of clear principles, policy of appeasement of the strong and
influential, neglecting the claims of the weak and its recommendations
are vitiated apart from the fact that it is full of inconsistencies and
contradictions…Our main grievance is that it has not only dismissed
Orissa’s claims on most superficial and unreasonable grounds, it has
not only summarily rejected our claims, but it has completely ignored
even to consider our claims.
 He pointed out that the Commission had done a blatant injustice to
Orissa by denying even an inch of land to her, ‘For God’s sake, please
do not drive the people of Orissa and the Oriya-speaking tracts to take
to the agitational approach for redress of their grievances.’
Niranjan Jena from the reserved seat of scheduled castes of
Dhenkanal said: ‘There are certain principles which are formulated by
the Commission to strictly observe and follow them, but in the case of
Orissa how far these principles have been applied, I doubt.’ His first
point of argument was against the chairman of the Commission, who
due to his long association with Bihar, refrained from taking any part in
the investigations on the territorial disputes between Bihar and Orissa.
Jena added, ‘it is to be observed how far it is justified on principles’.
B. C. Das from Ganjam said in the same motion that:

The SRC has laid much stress on the O’ Donnell Committee report,
but ignores the limitations under which the report was written. There
was at that time no formal Government to put up the case of Orissa.
There were other provincial governments which put every spoke on
the wheel to release as little of their territory as possible. The Congress
was boycotting the Committee and outside the Congress there were not
many Oriya leaders of eminence to put up the Orissa case. The regions
claimed by Oriyas were officered by non-Oriyas who came from
the majority language groups which had acquired vested interests in
the Oriya regions. In such circumstances all relevant facts could not
be brought before the O’Donnell Committee, so whatever Orissa got
was the minimum that could be spared to it.

He suggested setting up a boundary commission to examine Orissa’s

claim on Seraikella and Kharswan and the Sadar subdivision of
Singhbhum; Phuljhar and other predominantly Oriya areas in Madhya
Pradesh and other portions in the south such as a part of Mandasa,
Jalantra, Budharsing and Udayakhand.
A prominent leader T. Sanganna, representing the scheduled tribe
reserved seat from Rayagada–Phulbani in Orissa said on 22 December
1955 that:
The adivasis in Orissa as well as on its border areas are Oriya in
language and culture … Coming to the southern border of Orissa state
namely — the adivasi areas in the Orissa–Andhra border, I can say that
adjustment of boundaries resulting in the transfer of adivasi areas from
Andhra state to Orissa state is inevitably necessary at an early date in
the larger interest of the adivasi as a whole.
 When the debates were going on in the Parliament, one witnessed
considerable restlessness in different areas in Orissa as well. In
southern
Orissa, Parlakhemundi experienced a violent clash between the
Telugus and Oriyas.37 In a large-scale public meeting at Puri, Godavaris
Misra criticised the SRC for flouting the principle based on languages.
He castigated the Government of Orissa for the weak stand taken
against the report. Murari Tripathy called upon the youth and the
students to join the Utkala Sebaka Bahini which was formed by the
Utkala Sammilani, and asked them to work for attaining the goal. ‘If
the decisions were not revised, the issue would be dealt by the Oriyas
on the Badadanda (the Holy road in front of the Jagannath Temple)’,
he said.38 The Congress President Dhebar visited Orissa during the
first week of January and assured the people that justice would be
done to Orissa.
Despair and Violence
The Oriyas nurtured the hope that the SRC recommendations
concerning
the Oriya cause would be revised following the feedback
received from the Parliament and the Orissa Legislative Assembly.
However the verdict of the Government of India, which was made
known on 18 January 1956, showed only the status quo ante towards
Orissa. Regarding Orissa’s claim on the portion beyond the northern
border inside Bihar, the report in its paragraph 625 read, ‘Language by
itself does not, in our opinion, provide sufficient justification for
breaking up a district’, and, ‘above all, in view of the recommendations
which we make for the transfer of part of the Manbhum District to
West Bengal, the transfer of Seraikella subdivision, or any part there
of, to the state of Orissa will convert the Dhalbhum subdivision in
the east into an enclave which will not be physically contiguous to
the rest of Bihar’.
The argument appalled the Oriyas; to them it appeared that it was
a preconceived decision meant primarily to compensate Bengal and
minimise the damage to Bihar. The Provincial Congress Committee
reacted sharply to the recommendations and resolved in its meeting
that:
While still appealing to the public in and outside Orissa to pursue
peaceful and constitutional methods for the redress of our grievances …
the Committee feels its imperative duty to register its emphatic protest
against the injustice that is sought to be perpetrated against Orissa by
rejecting her minimum claims … the Committee feels that it will not be
 possible to hold any office of trust and responsibility by the members
of the Congress on its behalf.39

Along with the resolution, the legislators, the Parliament members and
ministers tendered their resignation to the Utkal Congress President
Biswanath Das.
On 19 January, The Samaj published a news item that the Provincial
Congress had called for the resignation of all its members from the
Legislative Assembly and Parliament. The Chief Minister Nabakrishna
Choudhury and the president of the Congress in Orissa Biswanath Das
went over to Delhi carrying their resignation letters.
Confident of the support of the ruling party, leaders from all over
Orissa called upon the general public, including the students, to join
their protest against the SRC recommendations. The ‘Boundary
Agitation’ started on 19 January 1956 with strong demonstrations in
Puri. The fire of agitation quickly spread all over the province, and
train and bus services were disrupted and offices, including the
secretariat,
were closed. On 20 January, two big processions were taken
out on all the main roads in Cuttack that ended in a congregation of
10,000 gathering at the Municipality ground. The poet Birakisore
Das composed an inspiring poem for the occasion which was sung
by Adaita Ballabh Ray. Leaders from all walks of life addressed the
students and the youth and praised them for taking a leading role
in the agitation. The president of the meeting Jadumani Mangaraj,
the firebrand leader of the Oriya movement in the 1930s, requested
the students of Ravenshaw College and Raja Bagicha School to give
up fasting and join active demonstration. It was declared that the
agitation would continue until the grievances were redressed; if needed
it might take recourse to violent means. Eminent social worker and
leader Sarala Devi, while exhorting the students to continue the
movement, also suggested that as a tactical step it was necessary to
stop the supply of ores and minerals to the industries in Bihar. This,
she felt, would leave the chief minister of Bihar and the prime minister
of the country with no choice but to concede. 40 Several student leaders
also made fiery speeches at the meeting. The Boundary Agitation thus
assumed the stature of the movement for Orissa’s national cause.
Although an appreciable size of a police force was brought from outside
and deployed to maintain law and order, the radio station at Cuttack
was seized. Orissa was cut off from the outside world due to disruption
of road, train and even air services because of severe protests.
 There were confrontations between the police and the agitators in
Puri, Sambalpur and Cuttack. On 22 January, a young student Sunil De
succumbed to police firing at Cuttack. During his funeral procession,
the chorus was ‘Sahid Sunil Kare Pukar, Jawaharlal Hosiyar’.41 At
Puri, a young student Benga Pania lost his life and another young
man Harihar Mohapatra, who had been seriously injured in police
firing, died shortly after in February. 42 The Utkal Congress Committee
appealed for peace and discipline. There was an all-party meeting at
Berhampur on 23 January. A number of legislators from the ruling
party, and Bodhram Dube, Member of Parliament, resigned. Police
excesses, curfew and promulgation of section 144 were condemned
by all parties in Orissa. There were wide-scale arrests made the next
day of those who broke section 144. Student leaders including Sarat
Patanaik and Manmoham Misra were arrested from Cuttack and
260 students and young men were arrested in Puri on 24 January. It
was estimated that property valued around 3 crores (30 million) was
destroyed at the Puri railway station. Hereafter, appeals were made
to the students to withdraw from the agitation; the principal of the
Ravenshaw College exhorted them to join their classes.
The repressive measures adopted by the administration and the
arrest of students made the Ganatantra Parishad and the Socialist
Party join hands in order to carry on the agitation. They arranged
a meeting on the Kathajori river bed under the aegis of the Utkala
Sammilani on 25 and 26 January 1956. They formed a Satyagraha
Committee to carry on the protests. They demanded a judicial tribunal
or a plebiscite for deciding on the contested areas with Bihar. Their
leaders including R. N. Singh Deo, Sarangadhar Das, Sarala Devi
and Godavaris Misra were among those who were arrested on 29
January for breaking the section 144.43 On 30 January, the students
were released from jail and joined their classes. With this, the Boundary
Agitation practically lost its steam. However outside Orissa, for
example in Calcutta, Seraikella and Singhbhum, there were protest
processions, demonstrations and picketing throughout the month of
February. As a counter-move, several Oriya teachers were thrown
out of the high schools in Chaibasa and Singhbhum.44 There was now
a demand all over Orissa for the Congress Party to take up the rein of
leadership and continue the agitation.
However, the ministry that had announced its mass resignation
continued to be in power with orders from the prime minister. It was
seen as a case of betrayal in the eyes of the people. The ruling party
was severely criticised for trying to abandon its responsibility towards
the Oriya cause. There were allegations and counter allegations on the
floor of the Orissa Assembly and in the media. The Home Minister
G. P. Pant accused the opposition, mainly the former rulers, for
instigating the people and spreading violence. All the agitations and
expressions of anger notwithstanding, the net result of the movement
at this stage appeared to be a complete disaster from the point of view
of the Oriyas.
The SRC continued to evoke a negative image in the minds of the
Oriya-speaking people; they were convinced that the Commission
was prejudicial to their cause. The territories that were considered
linguistically,
culturally and historically an integral part of Orissa were
allowed to stay outside the mainland by SRC, much the same way as
was done by its predecessor, the O’Donnell Committee. The SRC, in
spite of generating hopes of trust, ignored all the evidences in favour
of the arguments made for the Oriya cause. It also seemed to have
been biased in favour of the more influential provinces. The nature of
collecting evidences and hearing the petition was also suspect; the
chairman was absent while investigating the border disputes, where
Bihar was involved.
The SRC seemed to have contradicted its own stand on many
occasions. A strong example of this was the argument articulated by
the SRC that Dhalbhum which was a part of Bihar province would
become an enclave and that Bihar would not have any access to it if
connecting region like Manbhum went to Bengal and Seraikella and
Kharswan went to Orissa. It was overlooked that Dhalbhum was still
connected to Bihar by land without Seraikella and Kharswan. As to
the impracticability of Dhalbhum being an enclave, it was pointed out
that the Sankara tract and Debhog, the two enclaves of Oriya tract in
Madhya Pradesh, were not returned to Orissa.45
History was repeated; Orissa’s due was once again completely
ignored. From today’s vantage point, it would appear that the
recommendations of the SRC were almost predictable. They could not
have been otherwise given the fact that the leaders of Orissa were no
match for their counterparts from the neighbouring provinces in terms
of the influence one held over the seat of power in Delhi. In a way,
the conception of SRC itself left much to be desired; it was perhaps
not designed to possess an impartial and rational decision-making
capacity.
Oriya-speaking People as a Minority
in Jharkhand
The aspiration of the Oriyas for unification having melted away with
the report of the SRC, it was imperative that the outlying Oriya-
speaking people would have to continue as a minority. Placing them
in this situation for the ‘administrative convenience’ of the federal
structure, it is pertinent to analyse the specific safeguards meant for the
linguistic minorities and their level of implementation. It is essential
to understand the prevailing socio-political conditions vis-à-vis the
response of these people to their historical connection to the mainland.
As the scope of the present chapter would not permit accommodating
all the tracts, one may look into the case of Orissa’a outlying areas only
in the north, now in Jharkhand. The districts in Jharkhand that have
a considerable population of Oriyas are Purbi Singhbhum (erstwhile
Dhalbhum), Paschim Singhbhum, Seraikella–Kharswan, Gumla,
Ranchi and Simdega.
The major grievance of the Oriya-speaking people here had always
been the neglect of their language by the authorities. A conscious effort
to suppress the Oriya language was further intensified following the
SRC report. For instance, in Seraikella and Kharswan the position
of Oriya schools came down — the number of pure Oriya primary
schools were reduced to seven and mixed schools to 28 by 1958.
Five schools of pre-merger days were abolished and 13 switched to
Hindi medium. This happened even with the population ratio of 3:1
of Oriya-speaking against Hindi-speaking (Singh Deo 1964: 3). The
SRC’s recommendations that a state would be bilingual if there was
a substantial minority constituting 30 per cent of the population and
the same principle also holding good at the district level, were
completely
overlooked. On the other hand, the census figures continued to
mislead in showing a steady reduction of the Oriya-speaking people. In
the villages situated in the interior, Oriya schools at the primary level
completely disappeared. In the more urban areas, the individual efforts
of the Oriyas could keep the schools running in spite of the fact that
Oriya teachers were not appointed and textbooks were not available. In
Seraikella at present, there are only two Oriya primary schools. One of
them is in the Seraikella town where Oriya-speaking people constitute
60 per cent of the population. The Seraikella Municipality is taking an
initiative now to have an Oriya high school there. Most of the brahmin
villages in Singhbum have struggled to keep the Oriya schools running
so that their children could receive education in Oriya.
 The village Guhiapala, for instance, which is the seat for the famed
Atharvaveda Paippaladin settlement where 200 families live, runs its
own Oriya-medium school. The young boys who continue with their
study of the Paippaladin Samhita after their early training at the village
receive only a small scholarship to study in their special institute at
Puri. The village is well known for the rare documents of 20 Kandas
(books) of Paippalada Samhita. These are written in the Oriya script
and stand as the pristine symbol of a remarkable variant of the vedic
tradition. The death of the Oriya language here would mean the end
of a vedic legacy, a great heritage of our country.
With the formation of the Jharkhand province, the hopes of the
Oriyas were rekindled. Oriyas now saw a chance for the survival and
the growth of their language and culture. People from Oriya-speaking
villages started submitting representations for making avenues
available
to study in Oriya, at least at the primary level. For that to happen,
teachers are needed, school buildings have to be provided and the
grants-in-aid to the school has to be regularised. To have a glimpse of
a sample, one representation was made to the District Superintendent
of Education, Jamshedpur, by village Botala under Dumria block.
The representation dated 10 December 2007 was signed by more than
200 Oriya-speaking people of this village. The memorandum said that
though the village has more than 70 Oriya-speaking families, it is not
possible to teach the children in their mother tongue because of the
absence of any Oriya teacher at the primary level. The representation,
a copy of which was marked to the Vice-Chairman of the Minority
Linguistic Commission, requested for an Oriya primary school teacher
in Botala.
On 19 August 2005, the Utkal Association of Jamshedpur presented
to the Chief Minister Arjun Munda a memorandum for ‘Recognition
of Oriya as Second Language in Jharkhand and Solution of the
Problem of Oriya Linguistic Minorities’. The Association, formed in
1934, continues as the most active mouthpiece for the Oriya cause
in Jharkhand. With 2 per cent of the Oriya-speaking people in the
entire Jharkhand and 10 per cent in the Oriya-dominating districts,
and with more than 10 per cent in Seraikella and Kharswan alone,
these people believe that they are entitled to the rights of a linguistic
minority in Jharkhand.
Appealing for justice to the linguistic minorities, the memorandum
dwelt on the ancient connection of the Oriyas with the area, which is
their home land. It went on to elaborate on the closeness of the Oriyas
with the adivasis and the Moolvasis (indigenous inhabitants) of the land
who share the food habits, dress and important religious and cultural
festivals such as the Ratha Yatra of Lord Jagannath and the Chhau
traditions
with them. It referred to the unfairness in the figures of Census,
generated by the non-Oriya enumerators during the time of undivided
Bihar, which has recorded an inaccurate and reduced number of the
Oriya-speaking people. It mentioned the present large Oriya
population
in the industrial belt of Hazaribagh, Bokaro and Dhanbad. The
memorandum added that one-third of the Jharkhand land is deeply
attached to the Oriya language and culture; Oriya is the lingua franca
between different communities. The memorandum said:
We, therefore, request you to declare Oriya as a second language along
with other constitutionally recognised languages and take immediate
necessary steps to resolve our long-standing problem particularly:
a. Availability of Oriya textbooks on non-language subjects for classes
1 to X,
b. Appointments of Oriya primary and secondary teachers proportionate
to their population in the districts and as per guidelines of the
Minority Commission, Government of India,
c. Implementation of all previous agreements between the government
of undivided Bihar and Orissa on the problems of Oriya Linguistic
Minorities,
d. Establishment of an Academy of Oriya Language,
e. Representation of Oriya linguistic minorities in district educational
and planning committees,
f. Grant of financial aids to all cultural Oriya organisations of Jharkhand
like Utkal Association, Jamshedpur.

In a meeting at the Utkal Association premises on 28 September 2005,

the chief minister promised to declare Oriya as the second official
language. However, his ministry fell before this dream could be realised
and the issue was put in the back burner once again.
The declaration of Santali, Bengali and Urdu as second official
languages on the anniversary day of Jharkhand on 15 November
2006 frustrated the Oriyas further. There was wide media coverage
about the Oriya disappointment. ‘The decision came as a shock’,
said the Utkal Association president Rabin Satpathi.46 Similarly, the
Baharagora legislator and senior BJP leader Dr Dinesh Sarangi voiced
his serious concern over Oriya being ignored by the new government.
He welcomed the chief minister’s announcement for according the
second official language status to the three languages. ‘However,
exclusion of Oriya language’, he said, ‘which is spoken by more than
2 per cent of the people (as per the latest census report) in the state,
does not show the government intentions in good light.’ He also hinted
that the leaders would be forced to launch a vigorous agitation if the
government did not accord the legitimate rights to Oriya. ‘We hope
that such a situation would not arise. We would make a representation
before the government and also warn of the simmering resentment
against the decision’, said Dr Sarangi.47 An ultimatum was submitted
to the government by the Utkal Association to this effect that unless
remedial measure were taken on or before 26 January, there would be
agitation and hunger strike in front of the Legislative Assembly.48
On 6 June 2008, the Utkal Association of Jamshedpur presented
a memorandum to Naveen Patnaik, the chief minister of Orissa, for
taking up their cause and negotiate with his counterpart in Jharkhand
for making Oriya the second official language of Jharkhand and also
to provide support for the Oriya schools that struggle to survive.
The Utkala Sammilani has launched initiatives in the last couple
of years to start Oriya classes at the primary level in the outlying
tracts. One such step in this direction is to employ local women to
teach. This they believe will sustain the system, even though the pay
is a small pittance of Rs 750 per a month. With Orissa government’s
backing, the project has taken off. The Oriya region in Jharkhand is
the repository of numerous works of Oriya literature. Consistent and
close interaction of the literary organisations of mainland Orissa such
as the Orissa Sahitya Akademy with the Oriyas here is perceived to
be essential.
The Oriya-speaking people in this outlying tract have continuously
made serious efforts against heavy odds to preserve their language and
develop their literature. These efforts to protect their identity have kept
the Oriya culture alive here and has prevented total extinction of a part
of Orissa’s rich heritage. Rooted to their past history, the demand of
these people by and large is not for a change in the present
administrative
entity. Instead, the focus is on obtaining their legitimate rights
within the state of Jharkhand.
It would appear that the responsibility of safeguarding the linguistic
rights of the Oriya minority earlier by the Bihar state and then by the
new Jharkhand state has not been discharged with full responsibility.
The government at the centre needs to have an effective
implementation
plan and policy for protecting the interest of the linguistic
minorities. The state government of Orissa also has to shoulder the
responsibility of supporting education in Oriya for minorities outside
its borders.
An effective cultural map is desirable in the present situation side
by side with the existing political one where adequate care could be
taken of the people who are minorities here due to historical accidents.
Given a multilingual and composite culture in the state of Jharkhand,
upholding of legitimate linguistic rights reinforced by the constitutional
provisions in articles 350 and 350A and also by the Fundamental
Rights is vital. This would nullify any fissiparous tendencies while
safeguarding the genuine interest of the smaller language and cultural
groups.
The Divisive Forces: An Insight
It has already been seen earlier in the chapter that the forces for unifying
the Oriya-speaking people across the borders of the present political
entity have been operating for a long time and have continued even
in the wake of the SRC verdict. It is also important to look into the
divisive forces within the present political outline of Orissa that seem
to be becoming more active in recent times — one of the demands
being to constitute a new provincial unit comprising, what is claimed
to be, a distinct homogenous linguistic group.
Koshala Raj
The divisive force that the state encounters on its western part is in
the form of the demand for a Koshala Raj. The territories identified
for constituting a separate Koshala Raj state include 11 districts of
Orissa. They are: Sambalpur, Bolangir, Jharsuguda, Deogarh, Bargarh,
Sonepur, Boudh, Koraput, Sundergarh, Noapara and Kalahandi. The
region is a mineral-rich forest belt and accounts for almost 30 per cent
of the population of Orissa.
The Koshala Party and the Koshala Ekta Manch have been formed
to lead the separation movement with support from all parties of
western Orissa. Regional organisations, such as the Western Orissa
Jana Jagaran Parishad, the Orissa Sanskriti Samaj and the Western
Orissa Liberation Front have joined the newly formed organisations to
intensify the movement. In 2005, a conference was held at Sambalpur
where a deadline of 15 October — 100 years after Sambalpur was
united with Orissa on the same date in 1905 — was set for the formation
of the new state.
 This would set one to rethink whether the movement for the
formation of a new state is persuaded by vested political interests or
this represents a genuine case of distinct identity that would thrive and
blossom better if separated from Orissa, without upsetting the larger
interest of national integrity.
The movement for Koshala Raj is to establish the hypothesis that
the people of the western part of Orissa possess a language, culture
and historical traditions that are very different and distinct from
those of the coastal people. It is argued by them that the language
here is not a dialect of Oriya as some of the ‘Oriya’ intellectuals have
been articulating. They contend that some of the Sambalpuri words
can be traced directly to Sanskrit. The language is endowed with a
rich vocabulary and has a distinct style; it is as strong as the Oriya
language. The roots of the language are identified with the early adivasi
settlers who were followed by the non-adivasis. The intermixing of
these two groups led to the development of a language which became
‘Sambalpuri’. Hence the protagonists of the Koshala Raj movement pin
their logic on the language issue and conscious efforts are made for its
growth. They strongly reject the terminology of the ‘Oriya Identity’.
In reality, there are distinct words in the region which are used in
the spoken language and which constituted the oral literature. The
written language is the same as Oriya. The great poets of the area,
including Gangadhar Meher, contributed richly to Oriya literature
and language. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the western
part of Orissa has contributed to the make up of the Oriya culture and
traditions as much as the other part. Revisiting history of hundred
years, it would surprise any serious observer that Sambalpur that led
the pro-Orissa amalgamation movement against the Central Provinces
on the basis of language and cultural affinity around the end of the
nineteenth century, would now highlight their differences with Orissa
on the basis of the same attributes.
The newspaper Sambalpur Hitaishini acted as the voice of the
Oriyas since 1889 in their movement for unity. Raja Sudhala Dev
of Bamanda state was the champion of the cause of Oriya identity
and was a great patron of Oriya literature. He was nominated to be
the first President of the Utkala Sammilani. However, his sad and
sudden demise did not let it happen. Gangadhar Meher is the poet
laureate who hailed from western Orissa and is a household name in
the entire state. Chandra Sekhar Behera was the young leader who
was Gopabandhu’s counterpart in Sambalpur and brought Congress
and Gandhi to the region. He fought to safeguard the Oriya language
at the time of the great language crisis and fought for the unification
of Sambalpur with Orissa. He was among the frontline leaders of the
Utkala Sammilani.
The question then would be: why in the first place did the separatist
movement begin? It appears that the movement was directed
primarily
to challenge the overlordship of the coastal people who are called
‘Oriyas’ as distinct from ‘Sambalpuris’. The roots for such a psyche
could be seen from the very inception of the union. The simplicity of
the people of the region was taken advantage of by the coastal people.
It was felt that the inflow of the coastal people to the Sambalpur region
created a situation akin to the one when the Bengalis from Bengal
landed in Orissa. Referring to such a development, Sir Reginald
Craddock said in the Parliament debate of the House of Commons in
1934–1935 that the Oriyas from Cuttack came there and ousted the
local ‘Brahmins’.49 The divisive tendency took deeper roots when the
Eastern States Union was formed by the princely states of Orissa in
1947–1948 to fight for a separate political unit instead of merging with
Orissa. Some of the states of the Eastern States Union are presently
the districts of western Orissa. Most of the districts claimed by the
Koshala Raj leaders had constituted the unit called Sambalpur and its
18 forts when the British had taken over the region from the Marathas.
A natural cohesiveness therefore grew among these tracts as a result
of their past sharing of the same administrative unit.
Subsequently, during the working period of the SRC and the
Boundary Agitation of 1954, Sambalpur actively participated in the
amalgamation movement for getting the outlying Oriya areas back
with Orissa. It is known that the Oriya areas in Madhya Pradesh have
a natural affinity with western Orissa. Besides, the Singh royalties in
Singhbhum, Seraikella and Kharswan have long-standing marriage
alliances with Sambalpur’s former ruling family as well as with the
rest of the former princely states of western Orissa. In spite of these
facts, cries for ‘Wapas Chalo Madhya Pradesh’ (Let’s go back to Madhya
Pradesh) could be heard from some quarters during this time.50 The
agitation during the Hirakud Dam construction protesting against the
displacement of the people was led by the former chief of Bolangir–
Patna R. N. Singh Deo. A genuine cause, it was also a move to gain
some mileage for his party, the Ganatantra Parishad, against the ruling
Congress Party. The concept of Koshala Raj was played into the minds
of the people during this time, drawing reference to the epic time when
the Koshala had included the western Orissa.
 The people of western Orissa felt aggrieved that the government’s
main focus was on coastal districts while their region remained
largely neglected. The western Orissa Development Council,
constituted
by the government in 1998, did not appear to be effective.
The people of this region continued to suffer from abject poverty and
deprivation. With the reshuffle in the Indian federation by the
formation
of three new provinces in 2000, the movement for the Koshala
Raj thus intensified.
It appears that the collective memory of the Oriya movement in
the nineteenth and twentieth century got faded with time, while the
individual identity of the Koshala Raj with a political over-tone has
gained a wider appeal.
One may justifiably conclude that the feeling of alienation seems
to have arisen primarily from a sense of deprivation and exploitation
at the hands of the people from the coastal Orissa which is the power
centre of the state. However, the ambition of the high profile
politicians
has also contributed to the movement for separation. Be that
as it may, the responsibility lies with the administration to nurse the
past injury and ensure that the people of this region are taken into
confidence and feel themselves as a part of the mainstream. A part of
this effort can be seen with better communication facilities over road
and rail being built. The Western Orissa Development Council has
now been vested with more power to bring about further growth of
the area. One is also witnessing rapid industrialisation in Jharsuguda,
part of Sambalpur and in Bargarh, which however does not exclude
the perils that come with it. Nevertheless, the western part of Orissa
now seems to be a happening place and several places, not just Rourkela,
are showing up prominently in the industrial map of Orissa. The plan
of constructing an airport near Jharsuguda ought to go a long way in
consolidating the numerous constructive projects.
With such developments, the people of the area could perceive
themselves as a part of the mainstream in Orissa on account of the
economic and political equality that they have gained vis-à-vis the
coastal area. The other, a contrasting scenario, could be a strong
sense of separate identity, again born out of the all-round growth.
Adivasi
Orissa is characterised by the presence of adivasi concentrations in
its southern, western and northern parts; they constitute 24 per cent
of Orissa’s population. According to the 1981 census, 8.35 per cent
of the number speak their own languages. The rest have mostly
adopted Oriya. The two adivasi language groups in Orissa belong to
the Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic categories that are again divided
into sub-groups. They are mainly Kondh, Gond, Kisan, Oraon under
the Dravidian group and Juang, Munda, Savara, Gadaba, Bonda,
Mundari, Ho and Santali in the Austro-Asiatic group. These people
lived mostly in the hills and forests and at different period, came under
the Hindu rule who in turn owed allegiance to the monarchy in the
coastal capital. Oriya being the official language of the centralised
rule, they all came under the Oriya banner. For instance, there is a
song in the folklore among the Didayi group of the Munda stock in
Orissa that says that the Didayi, Kandha, Bonda and Chelia are all
‘Odias’ (Panda 1989: 48). There was a friendly co-existence and no one
thought of a language barrier. There was no attempt to liquidate the
indigenous languages by the rulers. Nevertheless, not being the official
language, the growth of these languages was no doubt restricted;
such a tendency was also seen in many other parts of the country.
The SRC worked on the federal divisions of the country on the basis
of the already recognised languages in the Constitution which did
not include any adivasi language. When the demand for the adivasi
state of Jharkhand was made to the SRC, it was turned down on
the basis of the absence of any single recognised adivasi language
holding a majority.
The Jharkhand movement, although it seems to have been
motivated
to some extent by the formation of the Orissa province, had
never made language the indicator of its identity. They were multiple
linguistic groups and sub-groups who claimed Jharkhand on the basis
of geography, history, economic considerations and cultural traditions.
In fact, any single linguistic identity would have been its undoing.
The weight of linguistic distinctiveness however has not been
lost sight of. There have been much development of the adivasi
languages;
scripts have been formulated, literature has been growing. For
example, Santali, whose script was invented by Raghunath Murmu
from Orissa in 1925, is already included in the Eighth Schedule of the
Constitution. Mundari, Kudukh, Ho and many others are in line for
similar status. The adivasis also have their All India Tribal Writers
Forum; they are attempting to establish their respective linguistic
identities. What if their aspiration culminates into demanding political
units with marked out territories on the basis of language? Jaipal had
indicated the presence of inherent unsettling forces during the SRC
debates in the Parliament on 26 July 1956. He had said:
 Take my own language Mundari … my language has a 14-volume
dictionary …. The point is this and it is a fact that there are more people
who speak the Mundari language than Kashmiri or even Oriya or some
of the other languages. Supposing that had been one of the recognised
languages, how are you going to solve this problem of the reorganisation
of states on a linguistic basis for the Mundari-speaking people? ... You
will have to disrupt several states all over the place … Therefore I
oppose this question of reorganisation on a purely linguistic basis.51
The adivasis who were the earliest settlers in the Indian
subcontinent
have been dispersed all over. A Munda in Orissa or a Munda
in north-west may actually be working towards a common linguistic
identity; he has however imbibed much of the local culture and has also
contributed to its growth where he has settled. Today, it is important to
revisit the position of this large number of the indigenous population in
Orissa whose legacy to the eclectic culture of the land is as significant
as those of the Hindus. The development of these people on par with
other progressive sections is the priority of the administration.
Kandhamal is perhaps a sad example of our policy of exclusion and
the politics of convenience; they feed disruptive forces. The genesis
of the Kandhamal violence could be traced to the issue of identity
mobility. Before the British brought Kandhmal under their control,
there was the Pana community who had integrated with the Kandhs
of the land. They are, according to F.G. Bailey, the Kandh Panas,
distinct from the Pana community who migrated later. The Panas in
Kandhamal speak Kui which is the Kandh language, have adopted
Kandh culture and practice their rites and rituals. They belong to the
scheduled caste and since 1990 have been demanding to be enlisted
as a scheduled tribe in order to qualify for special benefits. This is
resisted by the Kandhs and there were flare-ups in 1994. The Kandhs
have formed their Utkal Kui Samaj and have floated a Kui-Lipi/Kui
scripts and are fiercely conscious of their status as sons of the soil
(Mahapatra 2005: 113). The Kandhs are animists, but a great deal
of conversion to Hinduism has taken place. The Panas are largely
Christian converts. This local yet a very crucial issue was isolated for a
long time. Over the years, the conflict for economic gain has assumed
religious dimensions, ostensibly fuelled by vested interests.
The nation-building vision has not considered the values of ‘the
ancient aristocracy’ of India. The adivasi lands have been taken over
for the growth of industries, river projects have displaced countless
numbers and an invaluable cultural heritage of our country has been
threatened. There appears to have been serious deficiency in matters
of compensation to the people whose home and security have been
overrun. It is not true that the adivasis are inflexible about their
traditions and resist every change. When the Tisco was founded, the
adivasis worked devotedly for the growth of the industry. The light of
the blast furnace was their supreme god, Sing-Bonga. The American
engineer. W. O. Renkin who hired them for construction work, was
venerated as the son of their local deity Rankini as he provided them
with resources for food and shelter.
The socio-political fabric may be properly planned where the ancient
man does not become ‘rootless’ in terms of his own culture. There is
an initiative today for the codification and authentication of adivasi
customs. Literacy, education and other modern indicators of growth
need to penetrate deeper into the adivasi society in order to bring them
into the mainstream. However, the adivasi ought to be equipped to take
his own decision based on rational thinking; he should not fall prey
to the power hungry political parties. Appreciating their tradition and
the richness of their culture would not only bring them closer to the
urbanised population, it could indeed enrich the latter’s outlook due
to the lofty ideals and thoughts enshrined in the ‘ancient aristocrats’
society and way of life. The Niyamgiri (Hill of Rules) has stood for
countless ages as the symbol of our faith in nature, of our belief to live in
harmony and with humility to nature’s supremacy. It is the temple of
the ancients, no less precious than Konarka. If Niyamgiri falls to the
cause of ‘nation-building vision’ through industrialisation, it would
sow the seeds of irreparable divisiveness that would spell disaster for
the land and its people.

Notes
1. The Samaj, 13 January 1954.
2. Ibid., 1 January 1954.
3. Ibid., 4 January 1954.
4. Ibid., 27 January 1954.
5. Ibid., 21 January 1954.
6. Niakhunta, Cuttack, December 1952, p. 34.
7. Ibid., July 1953, p. 22.
8. Niakhunta, Cuttack, December 1952, p. 29.
 9. Opinion of Pitamber Misra, Advocate General, 24 August 1953:
If the President could make a reference under Article 143 regarding
the question whether Seraikella and Kharswan have been validly
integrated with Bihar in view of the Agreements executed by the Rulers
of Seraikella and Kharswan in favour of the Dominion Government,
that would solve the problem for Orissa. The Orissa Assembly by
an unanimous Resolution may require the Government of Orissa
to request the President to refer the question to the Supreme Court
but how far the President will respect such request may be open to
question, for Article 143 vests the President with a discretion in the
matter and whether in the present circumstances the President will
exercise the discretion in favour of Orissa is a matter which should be
decided by the Government of Orissa and the Orissa Assembly (Notes
on Seraikella and Kharswan, November 1952–August 1953, Personal
files of Radhanath Rath, Archives, The Samaj).
10. Niakhunta, Cuttack, July 1953, p. 15.
11. Among the luminaries present were Bibekananda Mukherjee, editor of
Jugantar and its director Sukomal Ghose; Sudhansu Ghose, editor of
Hindusthan Standard; Jatindra Sarkar, joint editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika;
Sudhansu Bakshi and Tamonas Banerje, editors of Rupanjali; Chapalkanti
Bhattacharya, editor of Anandabazar Patrika; Professor Chhapra, editor of
Roza-na-Hind; Major S. B. Dutta, the President of Calcutta Rotary Club
and Debendra Nath Mukherjee, ex-Mayor of Calcutta Municipality
Corporation (The Samaj, 8 February 1954).
12. Rape of Democracy, published under the authority of the President, Utkala
Sammilani, Cuttack, March 1954, p. 32.
13. The Samaj, 10 February 1954.
14. Ibid., 2 March 1954.
15. The following list includes names of persons who were the signatories on
the notice for the meeting: Swami Bichitrananda Das, Harihara Mohapatra,
Chintamani Acharya, Dr Banabehari Patnaik, Dr Pranakrushna Parija,
Bhikari Charan Patnaik, Nabakisore Das (UUC Secretary), Biswanath
Pasait, L. K. Dasgupta, Bholanath Biswal, Raghu Rout, Madhusudan
Mohanty, Syamsunder Misra, Rangalal Modi, Ramakrushna Pati,
Sundarmani Patel, Banka Behari Das, Sobhan Khan, Artaballabh Mohanty,
Biren Mitra, Lakhsmi Narayan Sahu, M. A. Ameen, Syamsunder Jena,
Sriharsa Misra, Janaki Ballabh Patnaik, Gourchandra Rout, Chintamani
Panigrahi, Prasana Kumar Nanda, S. N. Dutta, Lalit Kumar Ghose,
Trilokya Nath Mohanty, Sarat Chandra Sarkar, Nirmal Chandra
Mukherjee, Bharat Chandra Das, Baidyanath Nayak (The Samaj, 17
February 1954).
16. Rape of Democracy, p. 32; The Samaj, 16 February 1954.
17. Sahay,Baldev,Facts about Seraikella and Kharswan, Patna, 1954.
18. Letters by A. P. Singh Deo to Dr K. N. Katju, Minister of Home
Affairs and States, Government of India, D.O.NO.M-I/54-18 dated the
12 March 1954.
19. The Samaj, 1 April 1954.
20. Ibid., 14 April 1954.
21. Ibid., 27 May 1954; Niakhunta, June 1954, p. 9.
22. Government Reports,
a) The Case of Orissa for the Sadar and the Seraikella Subdivisions of
Singhbhum district.
b) Orissa’s claim to certain Contiguous Oriya Areas in Madhya Pradesh.
c) Orissa’s claim to the Oriya areas in Telugu speaking region.
The areas in question which were listed and sent to the SRC were the
following: the entire Singhbhum district including Seraikella and Kharswan
from Bihar; Phuljhar, Bindranuagarh, Malkhordha, Chandrapur from
Madhya Pradesh; 1,600 square miles from the Visakhapatnam Agency
and the other Oriya-speaking areas including Parvatipur, Kurupam, hill
areas, entire Icchapur, some areas from Somepenth, Tikali and Patpatnam
from the south. It suggested that Seraikella and Kharswan needed to be
urgently transferred to Orissa through a mid-term report.
23. The Case for Transfer of the District of Singhbhum to Orissa (A Memorandum
submitted to the States Reorganisation Commission), Ganatantra Parishad,
Orissa, 22 May 1954, pp. 13–18.
24. The Samaj, 5 June 1954.
25. Nabeena, 29 June 1954.
26. The delegates included the representative of Hindusthan Standard; Bombay
Chronicle; the joint editor of The Samaj, Sriharsa Misra; Utkala Sambadika
Samgha’s general secretary Ramachandra Das and secretary, Narayan
Ratha; Bhagaban Pati of Matrubhumi; Gorachand Ratha and Biswanath
Mohapatra of Krusaka (The Samaj, 2 July 1954).
27. Sarangadhar Das, Lok Sabha Debates, 19 December 1955.
28. The Samaj, 10 and 12 July 1954.
29. Ibid., 15 July 1954.
30. Ibid., 20 October 1954.
31. Ibid., 8 November 1954.
32. Ibid., 12 and 19 July 1954.
33. Abua Jharkhand, 2 January 1955.
34. The Samaj, 12 February 1955.
35. The Prajatantra, 21 January 1956.
36. Lok Sabha Debate, 23 December 1955, SRC vol. v, pp. 1289–98.
37. The Samaj, 4 January 1956.
38. Ibid., 9 January 1956.
39. Orissa Legislative Assembly Proceedings, 29 February 1956, vol. viii,
no. 3, pp. 23 and 39.
40. The Samaj, 20 January 1956.
41. Ibid., 24 January 1956.
42. Utkala Sahitya, 28 February 1956.
43. The Samaj, 30 January 1956.
44. Ibid.
45. The Sankara Tract — the five villages of Sankara, Rabo, Mahodi, Bharatpur
and Rampur of the ex-state of Sarangagarh — are surrounded by the
Ambabhopa police station of Sambalpur district. This tract is cut off
from Madhya Pradesh territory on all the four sides with the result that
one cannot reach the tract from Madhya Pradesh without having to cross
Sambalpur district. The total population of these villages is 3,657 and their
area is roughly 4 square miles containing 429 houses.
The excise administration of these villages is being looked after by the
Deputy Commissioner, Sambalpur since 1911. There has been no change
in the status quo after the integration of Sarangagarh in Madhya Pradesh
on 1 January 1948. The people of the area are therefore used to official
transactions with the district of Sambalpur and its district’s officials. If the
tract is transferred to Orissa, the Orissa Excise Acts and Administrative
Rules, which cannot now be enforced as long as it is in Madhya Pradesh,
could be introduced there for better excise administration of the tract.
Administrative considerations arising out of the geographical compactness
of the area with Sambalpur are a compelling reason for the transfer of this
tract to Orissa.
Bindra–Nuagarh and Debhog are contiguous to the Kalahandi district
of Orissa. As a matter of fact, Debhog is an enclave of Madhya Pradesh
in the Kalahandi district of Orissa. These two are purely Oriya-speaking
areas having trade and economic relations with the neighbouring district
of Kalahand. Their transfer to Orissa from Madhya Pradesh will be
justified
on linguistic, economic and administrative considerations.
(‘Orissa’s Claim to Certain Contiguous Oriya Areas in Madhya Pradesh’,
The Government Report presented to the SRC in 1954).
46. Hindustan Times, 17 November 2006.
47. Ibid.
48. Uditvani, 16 and 22 November 2006.
49. Parliament Debates, House of Commons, 1934–1935, vol. 299, pp. 484–85,
11–12 March.
50. The Samaj, 20 August 1954.
51. States Reorganisation Bill, 28 July 1956, SRC vol. vi, p. 1395.
References
Mahapatra, L. K. 2005. People and Cultural Traditions of Orissa. Cuttack: New
Age Publications.
Mohanty, Nivedita. 2005. Oriya Nationalism: Quest for a United Orissa, 1866–1956,
2nd ed. Jagatsinghpur: Prafulla.
Panda, Pramod Kumar. Comp. 1989. Didayi, Tribal Language Study Series,
vol. I. Bhubaneswar: Academy of Tribal Dialects and Culture, Harijan
and Tribal Welfare Department, Government of Orissa.
Routray, Nilamani. 1986. Mo Smruti O’ Anubhuti (Autobiography). Cuttack:
Grantha Mandir.
Sahaya, Baldev. 1952. Claims of West Bengal and Orissa on Territories of Bihar
X’Rayed. Patna: Bihar Association.
Singh Deo, N. N. 1954. Singhbhum, Seraikella and Kharswan Through the Ages.
Calcutta: Author.
———. 1964. The Position of Education in the Merged States of Seraikella and
Kharswan. Cuttack: Author.
Singh Deo, Pattayat Sri Bhupendra Narayan. 1955. Memorandum on States
Reorganization Commission Report, Re: Seraikella, Kharswan and Singhbhum.
Calcutta: Utpal Press.
Supakar, Sraddhakar. 1982. Maddhyama Purusha (autobiography). Cuttack:
Lekhaka Sahajoga Samity (Writers’ Cooperative Society).
 10
'Linguistc Provinces' to 'Homelands':
Shifting Paradigms of State-making in
Post-colonial *India
Sajal Nag

India’s freedom struggle was significant not just for its anti-colonial
content but also because it gave birth to the concept of Indian nation
by effectively integrating diverse regions of the country into an entity
called India. However, post-colonial India witnessed violent subnational
upheaval which demonstrated the strength of subnational
identities as well. Pan-Indian sentiment and regional aspirations have
always played an important role in the making of India.1 They were
in fact coeval streams. Anti-colonial struggle unified all the regions
and helped in putting up a powerful counter to the British. However,
once independence was achieved, nation-building required that regions
be reorganised on cultural basis and given adequate importance.
Thus the period immediately after independence experienced an
upsurge of subnationalist movements.2 Most of these movements
demanded political autonomy for a cultural zone. To quell the uprising,
the harassed Government of India on the one hand announced the
formation of Andhra Pradesh and on the other appointed the State
Reorganisation Commission (SRC) for the other belligerent groups
for the other belligerent groups. The SRC not only cooled the tempers
temporarily but actually raised the hope of the people. This chapter
attempts to show from a historical perspective, that contrary to the
belief that the SRC report was actually a textual commitment of India’s
adherence to the principle of linguistic provinces, it actually was an
attempt to depart from it. In fact, following a change in the Indian
state’ think tank led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself,
the SRC made out a case for composite multilingual provinces.
But under political expediency, the SRC went against its own case
and advocated linguistic provinces in mainland India. However for
north-east India, our special reference zone in this chapter, where
the demands were for multilingual and composite states, the SRC
 Sajal Nag

rejected the same. The rejection of the demands created conditions for
the emergence of demands for ‘homelands’ from a number of tribes
in north-east India which the SRC had argued very strongly against
in its text. What the SRC warned against was granted by the centre
creating grounds for more such demands.
The Making of the State Reorganisation
Commission Report
On 22 December 1953, Jawaharlal Nehru announced in the
Parliament
that a commission would be appointed to examine ‘objectively
and dispassionately’ the question of reorganisation of the states of
Indian union so that the welfare of the people of each constituent unit
as well as the nation as a whole was promoted. Accordingly, under
the resolution of the Government of India in the Ministry of Home
Affairs No. 53/69/53-Public, dated 29 December 1953, the said
commission
was appointed under the chairmanship of Justice Fazal Ali
whose objective was to:
investigate the conditions of the problem, the historical background,
the existing situation and the bearing of all important and relevant
factors thereon. They (the committee) will be free to consider any
proposal relating to such reorganisation. The government expect that the
commission would in the first instance not go into the details but make
recommendations in regard to broad principles which should govern the
solution of this problem and if they so choose the broad lines on which
particular states should be reorganised and submit interim reports for
the consideration of the government (Government of India 1995: i).

The tenure of the commission was up to 30 June 1955 which was

subsequently extended to 30 September 1955. According to their terms
of reference, the commission was at liberty to devise their own
procedure
for collecting information and for ascertaining public opinion.
The commission began by issuing a press note on 23 February 1954
inviting written memoranda from members of the public as well
as public associations interested in the problems of reorganisation
of states:
The States Reorganisations commission after giving due consideration
to the procedure that would be most suitable for the expeditious
execution of the task entrusted to them have decided to dispense
with a questionnaire. They invite members of the public as well as
 'Linguistic Provinces' to 'Homelands'

public associations interested in the problem of the reorganisation of

states to put their views and suggestions before the commission by
submitting written memoranda on matters on which they feel they
can assist them. The commission expects that wherever any concrete
suggestions are made they will be supported by historical and statistical
data and if any proposal regarding the formation of any new state or
states is made, it will if possible be accompanied by one or more maps,
as the case may be (Government of India 1995: ii).

The response was overwhelming. In fact, it seemed that the

constitution
of the SRC gave an impetus to the autonomy movements.
By the end of the deadline, the total number of documents that
reached the commission was a staggering 1,52,250. The bulk of these
communications ranged from simple telegrams, printed resolutions
and such material reflecting the wishes and demands of particular
localities to be included within one or the other unit. The number of
‘well prepared memoranda’ was about 2,000. Simultaneously, there
were 9,000 interviews of people of a cross section of people which
continued till July 1955 covering 104 places of the country extending
to about 38,000 miles (611,420,000 km).
The SRC report began with a study of the history and structure of
the existing provinces of the Indian union which it concluded was
a ‘result of accident and the circumstances attending the growth of
the British power in India and partly a by-product of historic process
of the integration of former Indian states’. It agreed that the British
were guided by a two-fold purpose in the organisation of provinces
in India: one, to uphold the direct authority of the supreme power in
areas of vital economic and strategic importance and two, to fill the
political vacuum arising from the destruction of the collapse of former
principalities. Of these two, the first was the primary objective which
obviously required suppression of traditional regional and dynastic
loyalties. This was sought to be achieved by erasing old frontiers
and creating new provinces ignoring natural affinities and common
economic interests. The administrative organisation of these provinces
was intended to secure their subordination to the central
government
which inevitably led to the formation of units with no natural
affinity. With the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century,
another factor emerged in the consideration of reorganisation. The
policy of balance and counterbalance began to override purely
administrativeconsiderations in making administrative changes. Thus
Bengal, which then included Bihar and Orissa, was divided with a
view to disperse revolutionary elements as well as to secure more
manageable administrative units.
The integration of Indian states saw, according to SRC, a
revolutionary
change in them. First, 216 states having a population of
little over 19 million were merged into the provinces. Second, 61 states
having a population of about 7 million were constituted into new
centrally administered units and third, 275 states with a population of
about 35 million were integrated to create new administrative units,
namely Rajasthan, Madhya Bharat, Travancore-Cochin, Saurashtra
and Patiala and Eastern Punjab States Union (PEPSU).3 Only three
states namely Hyderabad, Mysore and Jammu and Kashmir survived
these processes of integration. However, the internal structure of
these states as also their relationship with the centre were cased into
a new mould so as to fit them into the constitutional structure of
India. ‘While factors such as linguistic and ethnic homogeneity or
historical
tradition were taken into consideration to the extent practicable
in the process of integrating these diverse units with adjoining
provinces or constituting them into separate administrative units, the
compulsion of the dynamic urges of time necessitated prompt
decisions.
A number of settlements therefore made in respect of these states
had to be in the nature of transitional expedients’ (Government of India
1955: 5). Hence they too needed to be considered for reorganisation.
The SRC also noticed that the existing status of provinces were
discriminatory. To them, a peculiar feature of the Indian Constitution
was the disparate status of the constituent units of the union. The
constitutionrecognised three categories of states and gave each category
a pattern and status of its own. The status of the first of two categories
of states, i.e., those specified in Parts A and B of Schedule I of the
Constitution was based on the concept of federalism. Apart from
the institution of Rajpramukh (prime minister), the main feature
that distinguished Part B states from Part A states was the provision
contained in Article 371 which vested in the central executive
supervisoryauthority over the governments of these states for a specified
period. This provision, though was not consistent with the principles
federalism, did not however alter the basic relationship between
states and the centre which essentially rested on the principle of a
clear division of powers between the centre and the states. Part C
states, which ranked lowest in the hierarchy, were administered by the
centre on a unitary basis. The devolution of powers to the legislature
and governments of some of these states under the Part C States
Act 1951 did not detract from the legislative authority of parliament
over these states, or from the responsibility of the union government
to parliament, for their administration.
Apart from the states of the union, there were also territories
specified in Part D of Schedule I which formed part of India. In
respect of such territories, as also of any territory comprised within the
territory of India but not specified in this Schedule, the central
government not only had full authority but also the power to make
regulations.4
In the colonial period, even before the Act of 1935 was introduced,
which embodied the federal principle of governance, the status of
various administrative units’ vis-à-vis the central government had
differed from one another. By the close of the nineteenth century, there
were three different forms of provincial governments in existence,
namely those under a governor and executive council, those
administered by a lieutenant governor and those administered by a chief
commissioner. Many of the British Indian provinces such as Assam,
Bihar and Orissa; the Central Provinces, the North West Frontier
Province; and the Punjab and the United Provinces passed through
one or both of these earlier stages before acquiring the governor and
council form of government. A distinction was also made between
‘major provinces’ and ‘minor administrations’. In the first category were
included the governor’s provinces, Lieutenant Governor’s provinces
and the two larges chief commissionerships — Assam and Central
Provinces whose chief commissioners were in practice entrusted with
powers nearly as wide as those of Lieutenant Governors. All the other
chief commissionerships were called minor administrations and were
administered under the direct control of the central government,
exceptin the case of Ajmer-Merwara, British Baluchistan and the North
West Frontier Province, which were mainly administered through the
home department. The Government of India Act 1935 recognised
the circumstances in which it was formulated into three categories of
component units — namely governor’s Provinces, federating Indian
states and chief commissioner’s provinces. The classification was
reflected in the grouping of states of the Indian union as Part A, B and
C states except that not all former Indian states were now represented
by Part B states; a number of them had been merged in the provinces
or consolidated into centrally administered areas. However, departure
from the old classification was the recognition under the Constitution
of two categories of centrally administered areas, namely Part C and
Part D territories, as against only one such category recognised under
the1935 Act. At the time of the commencement of the Constitution,
there were nine Part A states, eight Part B states and 10 Part C states.
Since then, Parliament had by law established a new Part A state,
namely, Andhra Pradesh, and merged one Part C states, namely
Bilaspur, with another such state — Himachal Pradesh. Another
feature of the states of the Indian union was that none of them
represented a pre-existing sovereign unit. It was only in the case of
former Indian states that the right of accession on a negotiated basis
was conceded. Rulers of these states no doubt claimed a measure of
sovereignty. However, this sovereignty was severely overborne by the
paramountcy of the British Crown, not only in the field of external
affairs but also in respect of internal administration. Whatever element
of sovereignty of these rulers existed, it was surrendered by them to
Government of India before the commencement of the constitution.
Romanticism to Pragmatism: Shift from
Linguistic Principle
Although the colonial state too had favoured linguistic reorganisation
of provinces, it was convinced of the impracticability of such
reorganisation. The linguistic principle as an ostensible factor in
territorial changes figured for the first time in a letter from Sir Herbert
Risley, Home Secretary, and Government of India to the Government
of Bengal, dated 3 December 1903 in which the proposal for partition
was first mooted. Later in the partition resolution of 1905 and in the
dispatch of Lord Hardinge government to the secretary of state dated
25 August 1911 proposing the annulment of partition, language
was again prominently mentioned. The linguistic principle was
however pressed into service on these occasions only as a measure
of administrative convenience and to the extent it fitted into a
general
pattern which was determined by political exigencies. In actual
effect, the partition of Bengal involved a flagrant violation of
linguistic
affinities. The settlement of 1912 also showed little respect
for the linguistic principles in that it drew a clear line of distinction
between the Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus. The authors of the
Montague-Chelmsford Report of 1918 examined the suggestion for
the formation of sub-provinces on a linguistic and racial basis within
the existing provinces, with a view mainly to providing suitable units
for experiment in a responsible government. Although they rejected
the idea as impracticable, they commended the objective of smaller
and more homogeneous states:
We cannot doubt that the business of government would be simplified
if administrative units were both smaller and more homogeneous and
when we bear in mind the prospect of the immense burdens of
governmentin India being transferred to comparatively inexperienced
hands such considerations acquire additional weight. It is also a strong
argument in favour of linguistic or racial units of government that by
making it possible to conduct the business of legislation in the vernacular,
they would contribute to draw into the arena of public affairs men
who were not acquainted with English (cited in Kluyev 1980: 111).

Twelve years later, on the question of factors which should govern

redistribution of provinces, the Indian Statutory Commission stated:
if those who speak the same language from a compact and self contained
area, so situated and endowed as to be able to support its existence as
a separate province there is no doubt that the use of common speech
is a strong and natural basis for provincial autonomy. But it is not the
only test — race, religion, economic interest, geographical contiguity,
a due balance between country and town and between coast line and
interior may all be relevant factors. Most important of all perhaps, for
practical purposes, is the largest possible measure of general agreement
on the changes proposed, both on the side of the area that is gaining
and on the side of the area that is losing territory.5

The principle of linguistic provinces was part of the romanticism

that was associated with idea of nation and nation building. The
left leaning of the younger generation of nationalists like Jawaharlal
Nehru and Subhash Bose helped to uphold this principle. Bose was
a member in the Motilal Nehru Report from which the SRC could
envisage the potential areas which could be reorganised on linguistic
basis after independence. Similarly between 1928 and 1947, the Indian
National Congress reaffirmed its adherence to linguistic principles on
three more occasions — at the Calcutta session held in October 1937,
at a resolution passed at Wardha in 1938 and the election manifesto of
1945–1946 — on each occasion specifically speaking about Andhra,
Karnataka and Kerala for reorganisation.
However, the situation that emerged after independence and the
crisis that the the new nation state confronted evaporated the
romanticism.
The imagination of nationhood for India and the practice
of nation building proved two different domain altogether. The
nationalists had not imagined that independent India would emerge
as a partitioned India; that the princely states would decide to stay
out of the idea of India and they would require to be integrated;
that the parting with Pakistan would not be amicable; that partition
would practically mean competition for grabbing of land; that there
would be a communal holocaust coupled with displacement and
the immediate task of rehabilitation of displaced would be such a
gigantic problem, and above all, that the constituent nationalities
would be so unreasonable and impatient for the reorganisation of the
provinces. The transformation of yesterday’s romantic nationalists to
pragmatic administrators was neither easy nor smooth. It was against
this background that the leaders slowly began to shift from the idea
of linguistic provinces as they visualised that its implementation
would create more problems that it actually would solve.
The paradigm shift was quite visible after independence. Speaking
before the Constituent Assembly, the prime minister while conceding
the linguistic principle remarked, ‘first things must come first and the
first thing is the security and stability of India’ (Gopal 1947–1956: 256).
A strong India had to be built before other things could be
considered.However, the agitating groups were not willing to wait;
they felt Nehru was going back on his promises and principles
(Nag 2000: 140). Nehru was sympathetic to the Andhra cause but
was unwilling to make a start at that juncture, lest it would open
a Pandora’s Box. He wanted to delay any decision by appointing
commissions (ibid.). But the eventual grant of statehood to Andhra
under duress only precipitated further crisis. An angry Nehru
pleaded for ‘healthy nationalism … to counter these foolish and tribal
attitudes as also provincialism’ (Brecher 1959: 257). In fact by now,
Nehru had started to find virtues in the concept of composite states
created by the British. The example of Hyderabad, where people
spoke languages as diverse as Telugu and Urdu, appealed to Nehru
as potential centres of composite culture in south India while Bombay
had already developed as a cosmopolitan centre. Nehru felt it would
be ‘vandalistic to throw away’ these gains (Gopal 1947–1956: 261).
As a matter of fact, by 1955, Nehru was already thinking of creating
large composite city states out of Bombay consisting of Gujrati- and
Marathi-speaking areas including Vidharbha. This he felt would be the
ideal way of having larger as well as fewer states. He even went to the
extent of persuading chief ministers of Bengal and Bihar to agree to
merge with each other to form one state (Brecher 1959: 489). Madras
had agreed to include Travancore and Cochin. There was even talk
of one large Dakshina Pradhesh consisting of all Tamil, Malayalee
and Kannada-speaking areas.
This was followed by the appointment, on the recommendation of
the Drafting Committed of the Constituent Assembly, of a Linguistic
Provinces Commission known as Dar Commission for the purpose
of enquiring into and reporting on the desirability or otherwise of
the creation of any of the proposed provinces of Andhra, Karnataka,
Kerala and Maharashtra and fixing their boundaries, and assessing
the financial, economic and administrative and other consequences
in those provinces and adjoining territories of India. It was quite clear
from the terms of reference of this commission that reconstitution of
provinces solely on a linguistic basis was no longer taken for granted.
The Dar Commission was obviously influenced by ideas of the prime
minister and other influential ideologues of the post-colonial state.
The Dar Commission in its report to the Constituent Assembly in
1948 expressed its opinion not only against any reorganisation of
provincesunder the circumstance that existed then but also asserted
that relying exclusively on linguistic principle for state creation was
inadvisable. It wanted geographical contiguity, absence of pockets
and corridors, financial self-sufficiency, administrative convenience,
capacity for future development and large measure of agreement
within its borders and amongst the people speaking the same language
in its formation and non-imposition of the majority language on the
minority of the area.
When the Dar Commission Report failed to cool down the temper
of agitating groups, Nehru installed another committee which was
formed from within the Congress — the JVP Committee — comprising
Jawaharlal Nehru himself, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattavi Sitaramaya.
The JVP Committee, constituted by the Indian National Congress in
its Jaipur session in 1948 to examine the Dar Commission Report
and the new circumstance that arose after independence, sounded a
note of warning against the principle of linguistic principle saying:
(a) when Congress had approved of the principle it had not envisaged the
practical problems and implications of such reorganisation; (b) The primary
consideration must be the security, unity and economic prosperity of India
while discouraging separatist tendencies in the polity; and (c) Linguistic
provinces could only be applied after careful consideration of each individual
case without creating administrative dislocation or internal conflicts.
 The JVP Committee report was officially adopted by the Congress
Working Committee in 1949. It sealed the fate of the idea of linguistic
provinces. The report formed part of the election manifesto of the
Indian National Congress in 1951. This was quite a contrast to its
manifesto in the 1946 election. The manifesto of 1951 declared that
the reorganisation of states would depend on the wishes of the people.
The linguistic principle would apply but economic, administrative
and financial consideration would also be taken into account. Hence
when Andhra Pradesh state was created, it was because the Andhra
Provincial Congress, the Tamil Nadu Congress and the Madras
Government had agreed to it. However, it withheld support to the
proposal of Karnataka state for want of agreement of the majority of
the people of Mysore state. Before the state of Andhra was created,
Justice Wancho was appointed to enquire into the financial and other
implications of the decision. On 10 August 1953, the Andhra State
Formation Bill was presented in the Lok Sabha and passed. The
SRC was formed against this background when the romantic idea of
linguistic principle of state formation slowly gave way to composite
state systems under the emerging situation which saw violent uprising
over the question of province formation and big nationality versus small
nationality conflicts. Nehru was forced to say that small states make
small minds and he was all for multilingual, multicultural formations.
By now, Nehru had begun to see the virtues of large and composite
state and he did not hide it. However, evolving nationalities would not
hear any of it. Strangely, following the thinktank of the new nation,
the SRC was all for composite states but in practice, it still adhered
to the linguistic principle of state delineation with regard to most of
India, except for north-east Indian states. This was a paradox.
The SRC Report as the Sacred Text
The SRC report agreed that the demand for the reorganisation of
states is often equated with the demand for the formation of linguistic
provinces. This is because the movement for redistribution of British
Indian provinces was in a large measure a direct outcome of the
phenomenal development amongst them of a consciousness of being
distinct cultural units. When progressive public opinion in India
therefore crystallised in favour of rationalisation of administrative
units, the objective was conceived and sought in terms of linguistically
homogenous units.
 The SRC report felt that though the provinces of India were
reorganised many a time from the colonial period, the time for
redrawing the political map comprehensively and without delay
had arrived. However it had considered the cost of change and the
paramount question of unity and security of India, arguments both
for and against linguistic states, importance of language for
administrative
and other purposes and constitutional relationship between
the centre and the states of the Indian union before making its
recommendations and had come to the conclusion that ‘it is neither
possible nor desirable to reorganise states on the basis of the single
test of either language or culture but that a balanced approach to the
whole problem is necessary in the interests of the nation.’ (Government
of India 1955: 43). This was because Indian nationalism was ‘still to
develop into a positive concept’ whereas culture-based regionalism
centering round the idea of linguistic homogeneity represents values
easily intelligible to the average Indian: ‘The Indian nationalism must
acquire a deeper content before it becomes ideologically adequate to
withstand the gravitational pull of traditional narrower loyalties.’ In
other words, the SRC had noted the rise of regionalism in its vicious
form and its devastative impact on nation building. ‘Undue emphasis
on linguistic principle is likely to impede the rapid development of new
areas’ (ibid.). In post-partitioned India, there was a partition phobia and
every autonomy movement had begun to be seen as leading to
potential
partition of the country. The movements for separate provinces
or separation from oppressive big nationalities by small nationalities
or tribes were branded as ‘separatists’. In terms of practical problems,
linguistic reorganisations had to depend on figures of the mother
tongue given by the Census. The Census of India for 1951 though had
already been completed and it was done according to what were known
as ‘Census Tracts’. Therefore it was difficult to estimate the figures of
mother tongue on a taluk or tehsil basis. Without this, delimitation of
linguistic areas was difficult. Hence the SRC advocated multilingual
and composite provinces instead of unilingual provinces saying:
the multilingual units will prevent the utilisation of the machinery of
the state for furthering programmes of linguistic exclusiveness and in
favourable conditions may lead to tolerance and adjustment especially
if the importance which is now attached to economic development
diverts attention from the less important questions and barren
controversies regarding languages and culture ... a composite state
 which makes adequate provision for the protection of culture and the
encouragement of local languages would help to prevent the growth of
anti-national trends (ibid.: 45).

In its final proposal for reorganisation, the SRC conceded that the
states of the Indian union were very unequal in size, population and
resources and were even unequal before the law. It did see that the
public opinion, both within and without the Part B and Part C states,
had been severely critical of the present anomalous arrangement
which often violated the principle of equal rights and opportunities
for the people of India. If the states of the union were to be treated
on equal footing and if the status of Part A states was the standard,
then Part B and Part C states, must disappear. Similarly, if the states
of the union were to enjoy a uniform status, then it was necessary
that each state should be inherently capable of survival as a viable
administrative unit.
The SRC agreed that every state would have multilingual regions
at its peripheries which might pose a challenge to the linguistic basis
of state formation. It also agreed that beside language, there can be
other bases of diversity which was a strong argument for a composite
state. Indeed, most demand for linguistic states came from non-Hindi
speaking states and there was argument/demand in favour of a
Hindi-speaking state as a few large states, which were presumed to
be Hindi speaking already existed. The clamour for their break up
into smaller states was either on a sub-linguistic or regional basis.
There were other problems associated with linguistic principle of
state reorganisation which the SRC did not touch upon. Linguistic
populations spawning large territories would mean that there would
be huge states as opposed to smaller ones. The SRC was of course
unequivocal in its opposition to the concept of smaller states. The
Ambedkarian formula of one state-one language formula rather than
one language-one state idea was also not given any consideration.
There was hardly any reflection on the impact of such reorganisation
on north-eastern states. In fact, the SRC reflected a serious loss of
memory and public consciousness of the existence of north-eastern
India while arguing or repudiating the concept of linguistic states. With
its myriad language groups, some only few hundreds, linguistic
principle
could have created havoc in terms of reorganisation of state.
It did not generate any debate on its own and essentially relied on the
representations made to it. The recommendations were entirely based
on the demands forwarded by various representatives of the people.
 As far as the north-east of India was concerned, the main discussion
was around Assam. Surprisingly, there were no demands for linguistic
states from north-eastern states which reflect the heterogeneity of the
region. Assam as a multilingual composite state wanted to maintain
the status quo and if possible, also desired inclusion of neighbouring
areas like Manipur and North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). The SRC
stated that from a historical point of view, Assam and north-east India
had been naturally a meeting place of many tribes and races. Right
through its history, there has been immigration into and settlement in
the state from various sources with the result that till comparatively
very recent times (that is to say up to 1931, when linguistic tabulations
was last undertaken), Assamese was not in fact a language spoken by a
majority of the inhabitants of the state. Assam also owed a great deal
to capital and enterprise from outside the state and its tea, coal and oil
industries have been built mainly as the result of such enterprise. The
proposals presented to the commission from Assam were as follows.
The Assam Pradesh Congress Committee, the local Communist
Party and the Tripura State Congress Committee as well as the
Government of Assam were broadly in favour of the status quo. Assam
however would welcome the merger, if possible, of Coochbehar,
Manipur and Tripura and closer connection with the administration
of NEFA which was then constitutionally a part of Assam but
administeredfrom the centre. The West Bengal State Congress demanded
that Goalpara be re-transferred to Bengal and tried to appropriate
a movement in favour of Bengal. However, this demand changed
the attitude of the local people who subsequently wanted merger
with Assam. It did create bitterness between the two states. Another
demand was that of Kamatapur state consisting of Goalpara, Garo
hills, Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar and Darjeeling. The SRC refused to
entertain this demand for the same reasons. It was multitribal and
composite in nature. A similar demand was that of Purbanchal Pradesh
which was also composite in nature though the dominance would
be that of the Bengali migrants. The eagerness of the Assamese to
get rid of the Bengali districts during and after partition had already
communalised the relationship between the two communities. With
the appointment of SRC, a Cachar State Reorganisations Committee
was set up in Cachar district of Assam. In an apparent empathy with
the tribal constituents, it declared in a memorandum to the SRC that:
with Cachar and Lushai Districts in despair under Assam, with the
Nagas in revolt and effectively defying Assam’s authority in every
 sphere, with Manipur and Tripura refusing to be the Cinderellas in
a State ... the only positive course left open to the Commission is in
our view is to suggest a separate administrative unit for these areas. It
would be called Purbanchal Pradesh which would be a heterogeneous
one with two divisions — one, comprising Cachar, tripura, Lushai
Hills and Manipur and the other NEFA and Naga hills. It was an
overambitious project given the anti-Bengali feeling in the north-east.
The idea smacked of a kind of Bengali dominance and was rejected by
the hill people as well as Tripura and Manipur who wanted full-fledged
statehood (Chaube 1973: 121).

The tribal leaders of Assam had demanded the formation of a hill

state. It too was a composite state comprising of myriad heterogeneous
tribes who surprisingly agreed to come under one administrative unit.
It just wanted separation from Assam and a separate federal existence.
The demand was reiterated at the Tura Conference of the tribal
leaders in October 1954 which contemplated the unification of all the
hill districts mentioned in Part A of the table appended to the Sixth
Schedule to the Constitution, including the Naga Hills district. Only
the Naga National Council sought independence of the Nagas from
Assam and India and wanted to remain aloof from the proposed hill
state. As can be seen, all the demands were for a composite state and
none wanted a linguistic province. However, despite the advocacy
of composite state by both the SRC and Prime Minister Nehru,
these were mostly rejected and rationalised as can be seen in section
which follows.
The SRC first dealt with the demand of the creation of hill state out
of Assam. Under the Constituent Assembly constituted in November
1946, a committee on Aboriginal Tribes had been constituted under
the chairmanship of Patel. This committee constituted a Advisory
Sub-committee on the North East Tribal and Excluded Areas under
the chairmanship of the chief minister of Assam Gopinath Bordoloi.
The commission noted that except for the independence of Naga Hills,
no demands for separate statehood — linguistic or otherwise — were
made. The demand for a hill state was of recent origin. ‘There is no
denying the fact that the demand for a hill state partly reflects the
“separatist pull of the extremist party”’ (Government of India 1955:
187–88). Other factors which are supposed to have lent support to
the demand were:
 1. Suspicion and distrust of the people of the plains by the tribal
people of this area.
2. The diversity of races and culture and the different levels of
social, educational and political development in the different
areas of this region which have prevented the tribal people from
coming up to the level of the people from the plains.
3. Lack of communications in these areas which has made it
difficult for the various tribes to come in close contact with the
rest of India.
4. Economic backwardness of the region.

In addition, the commission also recognised it as a ‘problem’

inherited from the colonial days. The British kept the tribals isolated
and away from the non-tribals through various constitutional devices
as a part of their ‘national park’ policy. By excluding all contacts
between them and the inhabitants of the plain districts, the economic
exploitation of the tribal people could be perpetuated undisturbed and
unnoticed. The demand for a separate state is partly a hangover of this
policy. After the departure of the British, there was now a growing
awareness amongst the tribal people of their political rights as full and
equal citizens of the Indian union which they did not have till this
moment and indeed could not well have had before independence.
The Inner Line Regulations policy was a deliberate policy of
complete
segregation between the plains and tribal people and it also
created divisions even within the tribal people themselves. As a result
of British and missionary influences, this created a new class which
has so far remained quite distinct from the general population living
either in the hills or plains. ‘The creation of new hills state will in our
opinion accentuate these distinctions. It will therefore prove in the
long run against the interests of the scheduled tribes’ (Government of
India 1955: 192). Moreover, the commission felt that separation from
Assam will add to the cost of administration and the coordination
of policies and programmes between the state of Assam and the hill
areas on the one hand and between the hill districts themselves on
the other. Generally, it felt the United Mikir and North Cachar Hills
and Mizo (Lushai) Hills were not in favour of a separate state and the
District Council in the Lushai Hills and Karbia Darbar (Mikir Hills
National Council) were in favour of the status quo. The agitation in
favour of a hills state was therefore confined to Garo and the Khasi and
Jaintia Hills. Owing to their geographical position, these two districts
necessarily had a closer association with adjoining plains district than
the rest of the hill or tribal areas; even in these two districts therefore,
an influential section of opinion viewed with disfavour the formation
of a separate hill state. The impression which was formed by the
SRC formed as a result of their tour of the area was that a substantial
body of public opinion, even in the tribal areas of Assam, had not, by
any means, been converted to the view that a new hill state should
be formed.
Taking all these factors into consideration, the SRC had come to
the conclusion that the formation of a hill state in this region was
neither feasible nor in the interest of the tribal people themselves. The
hill districts therefore should continue to form part of Assam and no
major changes should be made in their present constitutional pattern
(Chaube 1973: 187–88). There was also a discussion on the increase in
the quantum of autonomy of the district councils like the Khasi-Jaintia
and the Lushai whereas another opinion felt that as a body, the district
councils had failed in its objective. The SRC did not want to go into this
debate but wanted more emphasis on the development of infrastructure
by them. It then moved on to another proposal for the formation of
Purbanchal state. This proposal was raised earlier in 1948 too and was
examined by the Congress but was not pursued. The scheme envisaged
the constitution of Cachar, Tripura, Manipur, the Lushai Hills, the
Naga Hills and the NEFA into a composite state. The demand was
forwarded by the Cachar State Reorganisation Committee. The
committee
itself recognised that it would be a financially deficit state and
would have international boundary on three sides. The genesis of the
demand lay in the fact that a major part of Sylhet district was cut off
and transferred to Pakistan during partition. The Bengalis in Assam,
who used to feel that culturally and even geographically they belonged
to Bengal, found themselves isolated and under an environment which
was not congenial. The persecution of Bengalis and their language in
post-independent Assam was cited as a cause of resentment. However,
the SRC felt that the creation of Purbanchal state would mean
exchanging one set of problems for another and therefore it was not an
appropriate remedy for the grievances of the minorities.
Next was the issue of Tripura a Part C state with a population of
639,029. According to the opinion of the SRC as a small state, Tripura
could not stand by itself
 its merger in Assam in our opinion can be supported among other
reasons on the ground that it will be desirable to bring the entire
border between India and Pakistan under single control that of Assam
Government. Such merger will also make it possible to coordinate
development in Cachar and the contiguous area of Tripura. The Bengali-speaking
population in Assam after the merger will be a little more than
one-fifth of the total population of the state. It should not be difficult
for the Assam government to allay the apprehensions of the Bengali-speaking
people by treating this area, which requires development, as
a separate administrative division under a commissioner. The special
position of Bengali in this division should be recognised for official
and educational purposes. With safeguards, the merger of Tripura with
Assam will achieve for its people the fulfillment of their aspirations
of representative government at the state level without prejudicing
their linguistic and cultural interests (Chaube 1973: 192).
As far as NEFA was concerned, the SRC rejected the proposal of
Assam to integrate it fully with that state and felt that the current
arrangement of the area being ruled by the President of India through
the Governor of Assam with a separate cadre for the superior posts
recruited on all India basis should continue. Similarly for Naga Hills
too, it did not suggest any change and opined that it should continue
to remain a part of Assam. Even the transfer of Tuensang district
from NEFA was rejected. As far as Manipur was concerned, since
Manipur refused to be part of proposed Purbanchal and the SRC was
of the opinion that Assam should not be burdened with the additional
problem of administering this border area, this erstwhile princely state
should continue to be a centrally administered territory. However,
it was also conceded that Manipur could not insist on its separate
existence for a long time and hence it should be ready to join a larger
unit of the neighbourhood.
As a result of all these, the configuration of the new state of Assam
would include Tripura and a population of 9.7 million, and an area of
89,040 square miles (230,613,600 square kilometers). Linguistically
it would be a composite state with even the Assamese not having
any substantial majority. The new state which we propose will have
important problems to tackle. This area has been subject to periodical
floods against which protection will have to be sought in part by
building irrigation or flood protection works not considered so far as
flood control had to be handled as a regional problem. The road–rail
system in north-east India was moreover admittedly unsatisfactory in
relation to the growing needs of this area, including Manipur. The task
of economic development could be undertaken and substantial
cultural
autonomy could be enjoyed by the various linguistic and racial
groups only if two conditions were fulfilled namely, that the state
of Assam is compact, rich and resourceful and that there existed
within this state mutual tolerance and goodwill. Particularistic and
‘chauvinistic trends’ were bound to retard the progress of the state.
They should therefore be discouraged in every way (ibid. 194–95).
The SRC did not seem to adhere to the principle of linguistic
provinces
in north-east India. It not only rejected the numerous demands
for newer states but also recommended the merger of hostile areas
to create a composite state of Assam where neither the dominant
Assamese nor the challenger Bengalis would have majority. The tribals
had to swallow their complaints and grievances against the Assamese
ruling class and live within Assam. In fact, it was felt that the SRC
had ‘approached their problem of a hill state with a prejudiced mind’
(Rao 1976: 346–47). The SRC said that the demand for a separate
hill state emanated from the extremist with separatist tendency. This
separatist tendency was thought to be a result of the British policy of
divide and rule the hill and plainsmen through devices like Excluded
Area and Inner Line Regulation which were being perpetuated by
the Government of India as well. A critic found that ‘this is a familiar
argument advanced by the politicians of the plains. The commission
however forgot the point that there is a already Line System in Assam
which has been devised by the people of the plains. The ‘Inner Line’
(the line, introduced by the colonial government as per provision of
the Inner Line Regulations, Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation Act
1873, beyond which non-tribal were not allowed to enter the tribal
state without a valid pass) was demanded (in the colonial times) and
was still demanded by the tribal themselves. If there had not been the
Inner line, the situation in the hill areas would have been explosive’
(ibid. 347). The SRC felt that individually or collectively, the hill district
would not be able to command the resources, money, material and
manpower needed to implement the development schemes. Therefore
no hill state should be created. Two major considerations weighed
with the SRC in its non-recommendation of the formation of a hill
state: First, small states should not be created and second, that the
security of the frontiers should not be risked. The rejection of the
concept of hill state by the SRC fuelled stronger pan-tribal subnationalism.
The autonomy aspiration grew stronger. The Chief
Executivemember of the Garo Hills District Council Captain Williamson
A. Sangma convened a meeting of the chief executive members of
all district councils in Shillong on 16 and 17 June 1954. B. M. Roy,
the Chairman of the meeting in his address, stressed the need for the
formation of a separate hill state and amendment of the Sixth Schedule.
In the memorandum that was drafted on this occasion, it stated that
the ‘the younger generation especially are feeling very unhappy and
they see that they will in time be extinct. The fear of their future destiny
naturally makes them feel that it will be far better for them to have a
Hill State of their own’ (Chaube 1999: 122). The next step was the All
Hills Tribal Leader’s Conference held in Tura from 6–8 October 1954.
After the tour of the SRC, the Conference decided to form a Hills Tribal
Union and elected W. A. Sangma as the Chairman and B. B. Lyngdoh
as Secretary of its ad hoc executive body. The rejection of the hill state
demand was not compensated for by the enlargement of the powers of
the District Councils either. There was a strong sense of rejection among
the tribal people when the SRC report was made public. On 28 August
1955, during his visit to Shillong, Nehru appealed to a delegation of
tribal leaders for a calm and dispassionate consideration of the SRC
report. The Conference of the Hill leaders met in Aizawl to express
grave concern about the SRC’s inability to ‘to appreciate the aspirations
and demand of the tribal people of this part of the country’ and reiterated
the demand of bringing all hill areas under one administration.
It was in this conference that the Eastern India Tribal Union (EITU)
was formed in October 1955. The move to declare Assamese as the
official language of Assam unified and further strengthened the Hill
state movement. In June 1960, Captain Sangma called a conference
of the leaders of all the hill parties on 6 and 7 July 1960 in which the
All Party Hill Leaders Conference (APHLC) was born, replacing
the EITU. The conference vehemently opposed the move to impose
Assamese language on the hill people. When the Assam government
still went ahead with the proposal, the third APHLC conference
in its meeting held between 16–18 November 1960, resolved that,
‘(the passage of the language bill) was a clear proof of the unfair
attitude and firm determination of the Assamese community to
avail themselves of undue advantages and thereby enhance their
domination over the hill people and the rest of the people of the state
of Assam. ... The only solution of the crisis was “the creation of a
separate hill state”’ (ibid.: 132). After the conference, two APHLC
deputations were sent to meet the prime minister. In November
1960, Nehru offered the Scottish pattern of autonomy for the hills
to the hills leaders. The APHLC rejected the plan as they believed
that this did not solve the basic problem. However, a faction of it
called the ‘Assam Hill Peoples Conference’ later decided to accept it.
Accordingly, the Pataskar Commission was formed to look into the
quantum of autonomy that could be given to them. The commission
proposed ‘no basic change’ in the Sixth Schedule, disappointing
the hill leaders and making them raise the issue of a separate hill
state again. When the APHLC decided to boycott the 1967 general
election, the new Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Shillong
from 11–13 January 1967 and promised the reorganisation of Assam.
Following the 22nd Amendment of the Indian Constitution on
24 December 1969, the Indian Parliament created history by passing
the Assam Reorganisation (Meghalaya) Bill simultaneously in the
two houses which resulted in the creation of ‘an autonomous state to
be known as Meghalaya within the state of Assam comprising the
United Khasi and Jaintia hills and Garo hills district as defined in
the Sixth Schedule. The most important feature of the Meghalaya
Act was that it created a new tier in the structure of state in India
which was similar to the autonomous republics of the former USSR.
The executive power of the new unit was vested in the Governor of
Assam who was aided and advised by the Council of Ministers of
Meghalaya. A Legislative Assembly was also formed. In late 1971,
the President of India issued the North East Frontier (Administration)
Supplementary Regulation creating an Agency Council (later replaced
by a Pradesh Council). In the same year, the parliament passed
five Acts: the North Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, the 27th
Amendment of the Constitution of India Act, the Government of the
Union Territories (Amendment) Act, the Manipur Hill Areas Act
and the North Eastern Council Act. The passage of these Acts paved
the way for the creation of many new states in north-east India like
Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya which has its capital in Shillong.
Mizoram district and North East Frontier Tracts became the Union
Territories of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh respectively. The
development completely ignored the SRC report as far as north-east
India was concerned and created what the SRC report had cautioned
against. This left the SRC report completely irrelevant in north-east
India. We trace the irrelevance of the SRC and the grant of homeland
in the form of statehood in Nagaland and Bodoland mainly because
Nagaland was the first while Bodoland was the most recent.
Naga Homeland
In the demand of hill states, Naga Hills did not figure because the
Naga National Council wanted a Naga homeland outside India and
not within the country. Hence it did not join most of the autonomy
demand movements. The SRC noted that ‘the Naga National Council
seeks independence from Assam and India and to remain aloof from
the proposed hill state’ (Government of India 1955: 184). Though there
was no proposal for a Naga province from the people, the SRC found
that ‘the Naga hills district present a special problem’. Owing to the
activities of the extremist elements, the law and order situation in this
area had been unstable in the 1950s and 1960s. The Nagas boycotted
the elections to the autonomous bodies with the result that the area
has had to be administered directly by the Assam Government. It was
represented to the SRC that the law and order problem in the Naga Hills
District was the same as in Tuensang area of NEFA and that unless the
entire area was brought under one authority, the situation could not be
effectively dealt with. However, it was stated on behalf of the Assam
government that the Naga Hills District was relatively quiet during
the last two or three years and that there were indications of the
people of the area abjuring violence in favour of peaceful methods.
‘After taking the relevant factors into account, we have come to the
conclusion that it would not be desirable to suggest any change in
regard the Naga hills district’ (Government of India 1955: 193).
In fact after the disappointing report of the SRC as far as north-eastern
region was concerned, the tribal leaders stepped up the hills state
movement wherein they invited the Naga leaders as well. Though the
Nagas participated in one such meeting, they were not enthusiastic
about the concept. They still adhered to the idea of sovereignty. In a
discussion between the Khasi leaders and a Naga delegation led by
Phizo, the latter commented:
I feel the Hill state demand had already achieved its mission. It has
shaken the Assamese. In Politics, it is not mere majority but a matter
of organization .... If one day we achieve independence, it will not
mean that India granted it; it will be because India can no longer stand
against the voice of the world. You can help us much in this matter by
speaking about us to the many tourists. If we come down, it will not
be helpful to you (Chaube 1999: 124).
The Naga construction of self vis-à-vis Indians was essentially based
on the principle of ‘othering’. They argued that: ‘(1) ethnically Nagas
are from a distinct stock; (2) they have a distint social life, manner
of living, laws and customs and even their method of governance
of people was quite different; (3) in religion, the great majority of
the Nagas are animists, but Christianity which was introduced by
the American Baptists long before the advent of the British rule is
now speedily spreading.’6 Borrowing heavily from the colonial
construction,
the Naga intelligentsia constructed their identity which
was not only based on differentiation but also was fluid and shifting
(See Nag 2008). Similarly, the territorial demand for a Naga Homeland
was also changing. Initially it comprised the then Naga Hills District.
Later, they demanded the inclusion of Tuensang area and
subsequently
even the Naga inhabited area of Assam and Manipur state.
However the homeland was visualised as an exclusive domain of
the Nagas where they would have political, economic, social and
cultural
hegemony. However, this was camouflaged under the demand
of a homeland which was a ‘return’ to its pristine form:
Nagaland is a wonderful country and the people are a peculiar people
who are happy and contented. It is a country in this twentieth century
where there is no political party, no class distinction, no class feeling
or caste system, no complain of economic maladjustment, no pauper,
no (family without) property, no liquor ban, no opium den, no dancing
hall, no brothel, no law for death penalty, no law to imprison a person,
no land tax of any kind. It is purely a country of people owned by the
people, and managed by the people for the common interest of the
people. Every village is a small republic and has its own council and
assemblies established from time immemorial and it is dynamically
alive. Nagaland is a country of Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams.7

The rejection of the Akbar Hydari–Naga National Council (NNC)

Agreement and open defiance by a section of the Nagas and the
announcement of a Government in Exile resulted in the Indian
army moving in. The movement of the Indian army to suppress the
rebellion and the consequent encounter between the underground
Nagas and security forces continued causing havoc to the Naga social
fabric. This activated the Naga civil society. A large body of the Naga
people decided to rescue Naga Hills from this devastation and bring
a semblance of stability. This civil society group, which united itself
under the banner of Naga Peoples’ Convention, negotiated with the
Government of India and brought about some kind of settlement
which included the unification of Tuensang with Naga Hills and
the creation of a Naga state under the Ministry of External Affairs.
Prime Minister Nehru was willing to go any extent, expect short of
sovereignty, to resolve the Naga impasse. In July 1960, the terms were
discussed by the prime minister with the Naga Peoples Convention
leaders, resulting in the 16-point Agreement whereby the
government
India agreed to constitute a Nagaland state as the 16th state of
India. However, the prime minister did face opposition in his endeavour
to grant statehood to Naga Hills and even with the nomenclature —
Nagaland. For the Nagas, the nomenclature ‘Nagaland’ was vital for
their identity and identification of their habitat. During the discussion,
some members raised objection to Nagaland being called a part of
India, while others objected to the idea of it being placed under the
Ministry of External Affairs. Some others also objected to the idea of
the Government of India signing an ‘agreement’ with a constituent
part of India. Dr Ram Subhag Sing from Sasaram was perplexed by
the nomenclature, ‘Nagaland’. He cautioned the prime minister of
its grave future implications. He said, ‘I therefore request the prime
minister to carefully name that area. It may be named Naga State or
Naga Pradesh. Nagaland is something bigger.’ 8 Raghunath Singh
supported the area being named Naga Province or Naga State instead
of Nagaland.9 C. K. Bhattacharjee from West Dinajpur even found
the name ‘outlandish’ and wanted it to be changed. 10 Members like
Vidya Charan Shukla asked the rationale behind placing Nagaland
under the Ministry of External Affairs rather than Home Ministry as
per the Constitution. Members like Ashoka Mehta, Dr M. S. Aney
and Sri Tyagi questioned the procedure of signing an ‘agreement’
between the Government of India and people of India. Since there
was never any agreement between the Government of India and the
people of Punjab or Uttar Pradesh (UP), they failed to understand
the necessity of such a legal document with the Naga people. In fact it
was the personality and stature of Nehru which was able to overcome
such opposition and convinced the members of the importance of
granting special treatment to the Nagas. The grant of statehood to the
Nagas in a territory meaningfully titled Nagaland was the realisation
of the Naga desire of a ‘homeland’.
Bodo Homeland
Like the hill tribes, plain the tribes of north-east India also had
autonomy
aspirations. The Bodos, then known as the Cacharis, were one
of the first to become conscious of their rights. As early as 4 January
1929, not less than four memoranda were submitted to the Simon
Commission. A more articulated expression of their aspirations was
made on February 1967 with the birth of the Plains Tribal Council of
Assam (PTCA). The PTCA represented not just the Bodos but also
the Barmans of Cachar, the Deoris, the Hojais, the Mishings and
the Kacharis which included the Sonowals, Lalungs, Meches and
Rabhas. It submitted a memorandum to the President of India on
20 May 1967 demanding full autonomy in the predominantly plains
tribal areas of the northern tract of Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang,
Lakhimpur and Sibsagar districts including all the tribal belts and
blocks of those areas so that tribals can: (a) adequately protect their
land, (b) give effective check to economic exploitation of tribals by
non-tribals, (c) conserve their language, culture, custom, counter
political domination by non-tribals over tribals and imposition of
anything which would disrupt their traditions and customs and (d)
grow according to their own genius and traditions. The PTCA demand
for any autonomous region of 1967 was upgraded to a demand for
Udayachal, a Union Territory, in 1973. However, in 1977, a section
of their leadership withdrew their demand for a Union Territory and
reverted to the original demand of an autonomous region. This resulted
in the breaking up of the PTCA into two. One of these, the PTCA
(progressive), reiterated their demand for a Union Territory called
Mishing-Bodoland for which they submitted a number of memoranda
between 1980 and 1983. The All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) was
in the meanwhile active during all these years and it managed to unite
the fighting PTCA factions. The ABSU also submitted a memorandum
to the centre demanding Union Territory status. Due to the failure of
the PTCA to get anything tangible from the government, the ABSU
took the initiative in its own hand. It listed the harms done to the
Bodo community by the Foreign National Movement which has been
spearheaded by the All Assam Students Union and felt that without
separation from Assam, the Bodos did not have any security or future.
The ABSU movement started with the demand of a Union Territory. 11
The twentieth conference of the ABSU, held from 19–22 December
1988, ushered in a more militant phase in the movement. The
conferencedropped all other demands and upgraded their demand to a
full-fledged state called Bodoland. It raised the popular slogan, ‘Divide
Assam Fifty Fifty: Revolution will come; we want human rights
Do or Die for Separate Homeland.’ 12 ‘However Bodoland is not meant
for only the Bodos, but is merely a nomenclature of a tribal state
including all the plains tribal of Assam. The non-tribal would also
be guaranteed with all the constitutional rights in the proposed
Bodoland’.13 The movement took a violent turn when two underground
organisations — the Bodo Security Force and the National Democratic
Front of Bodoland — came up to support not just statehood but
sovereignty for the Bodos. What all of these myriad groups struggled
for was no more a Bodo state — either federal or sovereign — but
a Bodo ‘homeland’. They insisted that a separate political unit was
necessary not only for the development of the tribals but also for the
survival of the tribe. It was also necessary for the preservation of the
language, culture and identity of the tribals (Chakladar 2004: 53).
The concept of homeland was striking because it imagined a territory
where the tribal life and identity would be preserved and perpetuated.
It was a kind of sanctuary for a people who were otherwise being
threatened of extinction. Indeed like other plain tribals, Bodos too were
facing severe economic deprivation and alienation from their land and
needed legislative protection. The idea of homeland was not new
to the Bodos. The United Tribal Nationalist Front (UTNLF), one
of the many splinter groups that were formed in 1984, had actually
demanded a separate union territory called ‘Tribal-land’ for the plain
tribal of Assam. In 1986, it was re-designated as ‘Tribal homeland’
(ibid.). The Bodo leaders expected that other tribal groups would join
their movement. However, the language issue isolated them from other
groups and hence they confined their demands to the Bodos only. The
ABSU for instance declared in unequivocal terms: ‘The main aim and
objective of the ABSU shall be to promote the language, literature
and culture of the Bodos’.14 It further stated that it will endeavour to
improve the Bodo language through printing of magazines and other
literary works and will strive to develop and safeguard the culture
of Bodos by bringing in reforms. Moreover, it would ‘try to develop
and safeguard the Bodo race economically by taking up economic
programmes from time to time’.15 Subsequently, the movement
gradually turned arrogant and authoritarian and lost its democratic
and federal character. The underground leadership made violent efforts
to threaten and evict the non-Bodo tribals, non-tribal Assamese and
immigrant groups in an endeavour to free the Bodo territory of non-Bodos
and make it homogenous so that the Bodos became the majority
community in the area. This was to secure the political hegemony
of the Bodos in the area. Such security concerns, either political or
social, were integral to the concept of homeland which the SRC had
anticipated and cautioned about much earlier.
The Utopia of Homeland
As a concept, ‘homeland’ sounds very pristine, innocuous and even
pious. However, as a political ideology it had dangerous portents.
The SRC was able to foresee such potentialities and as such was very
critical of the concept of homeland right from the beginning.
There are certain aspects of the claim for linguistic units, the implication
of which should be carefully analysed and understood. The most
important of these is the doctrine of any area claiming to be the
‘homeland’ of all the peoples speaking a particular language. The
implication is that a Bengali, and Andhra or a Malayali wherever he is
settled has his homeland in Bengal, Andhra or Kerala; that he has a
loyalty to that home land, over riding the loyalty to the area of his
domicile and that in the same way, the homeland state his claims on
him wherever he may be. We cannot strongly emphasise the dangerous
character of this doctrine especially from the point of view of our
national unity. If any section of people living in one state is encouraged
to look upon another state as its true home land and protector on the
sole ground of language then this would cut at the very root of the
national idea.
It follows from the acceptance of the doctrine of the home land that
the home land itself should be demarcated with care and it has
accordingly been proposed that in determining the boundaries between
linguistic groups the village should be taken as the unit. In border
villages generally the population is largely mixed. If on the basis of the
majority belonging to one language group, a village is separated from
the administrative unit to which it is now attached, then it follows
that special provisions will have to be made to see that the language
composition of such a village does not change at any future time. This
is impossible in what is likely to be dynamic economy.
The idea that all people who speak the same language and constitute
a majority, whether in a village or a taluk, should be attached to their
home land will do immense harm to our national growth and must
therefore be rejected unequivocally. The allegations that Census returns
in the border areas have been tampered with illustrate the dangerous
possibilities inherent in this idea.
The homeland concept must also deepen majority and minority
consciousness and thereby aggravate the minority consciousness
and thereby aggravate the minority problem. The constitution of
India guarantees common citizenship to all Indian people. There can
therefore be only one nationality in India and the idea of majority and
minority would seem to run counter to it. Unfortunately, in a number
 of states discriminatory practices against people from other units seem
to exist even at the present time. The homeland doctrine if encourages
is bound to accentuate these trends. This is a problem of considerable
importance ... [a balanced approach would appear to be] to repudiate
the ‘homeland’ which negates one of the fundamental principles of the
Indian constitution, namely equal opportunities and equal rights for all
citizens throughout the length and breadth of the union (Government
of India 1955: 44–46).

In fact, even before homeland states were created, the groups who
had this demand began to apply methods by which their hegemony
was established in the designated territory. These methods included
ethnic cleansing of two types: one, by ousting a section of people by
branding them as outsiders, people of non-indigenous origin, foreign
nationals, refugees; and two, by committing genocides, thereby
frightening minority groups to leaving the area. Thus, there was the
Shiv Sena movement in Maharashtra; Foreign National movement
in Assam; anti-outsider riots in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Manipur;
anti-refugee movement in Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura; and the
anti-Kuki movements of the Nagas in Nagaland and Manipur. In the
proposed Bodoland area, there were systematic attempts to intimidate,
generate conflict situation and expel minority groups from the area
with the aim to occupy their territories, grab land resources and build
majority for the Bodos. In similar attempts, the Nagas tried to get rid
of the Kukis, Dimasas, Karbis and Nepalis from their area. Both in
Bodoland and Nagaland, armed underground outfits were used to
free the respective territories of all minority groups to not only build
the political hegemony of the dominant group, but also to deny the
minorities of their legitimate rights, grab their land and even expel
them from the area. This happened throughout the 1990s during
the Bodoland and Greater Nagaland movements. In October 2008,
there was again a spurt in such movements in the Bodoland area and
armed underground activists were unleashed on unarmed minorities
which forced the latter to leave the territory and migrate to other
areas. Unfortunately, these minorities are ignored in the negotiated
settlements even by the Indian state.
Conclusion
The post-colonial Indian polity had been a site of acrimonious
contestations. While the romantic nationalists imagined it as one
‘India’, subnationalists wanted a piece of this territory as their exclusive
hegemony. This contest between idealistic nationalists and aggressive
subnationalists threatened to tear apart the polity — a situation seen
by an American political scientist as ‘the dangerous decades’ (Selig
1960). The reorganisation of the Indian provinces was a committed
nationalist agenda. Hence the autonomy groups were impatient to see
its implementation. A slight postponement by the centre resulted in
upheaval as was evident in the Andhra state movement led by Pottu
Sitaramalu. The SRC was formed with the objective of delineating
potential areas which could be converted into autonomous federal
units. The principle of reorganisation of states as laid down in the
Motilal Nehru Committee was the principle of linguistic provinces.
Following its recommendation, a series of new states were created
conforming to traditional linguistic regions (Brass: 1990: 169).
However, when Assam wanted to be a unilingual province, it was
considered ‘chauvinistic’ (Government of India 1955). Assam did not
actually demand reorganisation on the basis of linguistic principle and
wanted a composite province whose language would be Assamese.
However, this created a problem. Composite culture did not go with
unilingualism as far as the SRC was concerned. Marathas could
have Maharashtra, Gujratis could have Gujarat, Tamils could have
Tamil Nadu and so on. However, Khasis could not have a Khasi
state only because this community was too small. Same was the case
with other small tribal groups of not just north-east India but other
areas as well. On these contradictory policies, Paul Brass rationalised:
‘Moreover in the prolonged process, the practice of Indian state
developeda coherent and consistent form somewhat different from the
ideology proclaimed by its leaders. Many Indian leaders proclaimed
their goals after independence to be the establishment of a strong state
to which all the diverse peoples of India would transfer their primary
loyalties and submerge their cultural difference in a homogenous
nationalism. Others, somewhat more attuned to the realities of India’s
diverse cultural differences, thought a ‘composite’ nationalism would
emerge combining aspects from the cultures of the various major
religious, regional, linguistic and tribal peoples’ (Brass 1990: 171).
But why did the onus of carrying the light composite nationalism fall
on the small and weak tribes? Demographic strength and formation of
powerful elite in major nationalities ensured that decisions went in
their favour. Since the small groups had neither, many north-eastern
tribes subsequently adopted violence as a means to be heard and
achieve similar results. A number of them succeeded too.
 The SRC report actually was not a sacred text. It was violated many
times, at least in north-east India. This was because the formation of
SRC was a contingent requirement. It did not automatically follow the
nationalist commitment of the colonial period to the post-colonial
period. The government would have liked to stabilise its new
independence
and concentrate on nation building — devoting more effort
on security and maintaining the integrity of the nation. However, its
the upheaval that followed the Vishalandhra movement compelled
to government to divert attention from these goals. The SRC report
has to be seen in this context. Other than peoples’ movement, there
were other compulsions as well. ‘The problem of reorganisation has
become emergent because India with her programme of large-scale
planning has to think in terms of enduring political units. A direct and
regrettable outcome of the present state of uncertainty is that here has
been a general reluctance to invest funds in dispute areas’ (Government
of India 1955: 23). While many saw reorganisation as balkanisation of
India, it was clear to the SRC that ‘the first essential objective of any
scheme of reorganisation must be the unity and security of India ... the
unity of India must be regarded as the prime factor in readjusting
territories’ (ibid.: 31).
As far as the rest of north-east India was concerned, the SRC
categorically
rejected any idea of a small state which was economically
unviable. This was despite the fact that a number of tribal communities
submitted representations for a separate state which they demanded
should be carved out of then Assam. By this time, Nehru’s adherence to
the idea of linguistic provinces was also shaken mainly by the violent
turmoil that India witnessed over the demand for separate states
following independence. He had experienced the parochialism that
regionalists encouraged and wanted to halt its rise by creating a
cosmopolitan mind and multicultural society in the form of big states
containing a number of linguistic communities in one political unit.
Therefore, small states were ruled out. However, despite it, a new state
of Nagaland was created in 1961 without any recommendation from
the SRC or even any strong movement for it, and that too under the
jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was followed by
the creation of a number of such smaller states during the regime of
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It became obvious that the SRC and
its recommendation had become irrelevant for north-east India. These
moves gave rise to a number of other demands including the one for
creation of a Karbi Anglong state, Dimaraji (North Cachar state),
Ahom state, Bodo state, Garo state, Kuki state, Hmar state, merger of
Naga areas in Manipur with the Naga areas of Nagaland, and so on.
A point which should be noted is that they all insisted on a ‘homeland’
and not just another state. So for the Karbis, it was Karbi Anglong,
for the Dimasas it was Dimaraji, for the Kukis it was Kukiland, for
the Garos, Garoland and so on. The SRC was rendered irrelevant
because states were now not seen as a linguistic area as in north-east
India because almost every village was a different linguistic area.
People saw states as ‘homelands’. Demands for states were thus not
just an autonomous political existence but also demands for homeland
and domain of hegemony. The principle of state reorganisation in
north-east India has therefore experienced a shifting paradigm which
has the potential of posing much serious concerns for the Indian state.
The SRC, despite its avowed acceptance, was actually shifting away
from the principle of linguistic province right from the beginning and
it had made it clear that its priority was security and integrity of the
nation. Though it still adhered to this principle for the rest of India, it
totally rejected this principle as far as north-east India was concerned
and did not concede any of the demands made by the people. While
demand for a hill state was rejected as ‘separatist’, others were just
brushed aside as ‘unviable’. Linguistic considerations were completely
ignored and people’s aspirations were banished. The irrelevance of
the SRC was further confirmed by the fact that despite its objections,
a number of states were subsequently created by the Government of
India. The SRC had failed to see the pre-colonial roots of regions
in north-east India where almost every cluster of villages was an
independent polity. If linguistic principle was allowed here, there
would be hundreds of states in this region alone. What these areas
needed is the notion of autonomy to signify a continuance of cultural
and political practices. The concept of hill state was a composite state
where a large number of tribal groups agreed to come under. However,
the SRC failed to see the spirit of this concept and rejected the idea.
As it usually happens, rejection only strengthens the resolution.
It created a subnationalist upsurge which the centre could not ignore.
In the hurry, they created states which only involved redrawing, the
political map but this did not satisfy the aspirations of autonomy
of all the groups. In a strange irony, the tribals now wanted the
application of a paradigm which was similar to the paradigm of
linguistic provinces applied to the rest of India. If Bengal was a state of
Bengalis and Tamil Nadu of the Tamils, then the Mizos of north-east
India wanted a state of the Mizos too, and so on. The only difference
was in terms of population viability as these groups did not match
the strength of those larger nationalities. The creation of Nagaland in
1963 gave the right encouragement to this idea. It was seen that the
state was not just an autonomous area — it was a domain where a
particular linguistic majority could hegemonise the polity, economy
and society; It was a space for linguistic power play. Therefore the
concept was named homeland. The shift from the concept of
composite
state to homeland in north-east India was not indigenous to
this region. It was borrowed from the larger states of India. The only
difference was that in north-east India, each language group was
a miniscule group and could not form a viable basis for statehood.
Hence it was seen as ‘negative’, ‘fissiparous’ and ‘dangerous’. It was
self-contradictory.
The SRC’s strong reaction to the concept of homeland was a
counter to linguistic communalism that was spreading throughout
India in the 1950s and 1960s. However, despite a correct perusal of
the situation, the SRC could do nothing about the demand for a
language-based state from big linguistic communities. What was
significant
was that the demand for language-based state was not really a
demand for a linguistic province anymore as was outlined in socialist
principles. Rather, it was a demand for a homeland of particular
language group which was opposed to the dominance or permanent
presence of other language groups in that territory. The sentiment was
sometimes as conceptualised as ‘son of the soil’ 16 or ‘nativism’ (Gupta
1989). As the competition for scarce resources and employment grew
stronger, such movements spread to new areas. Appropriation of such
sentiments were never missed by failed politicians and ideologically
bankrupt groups who started spearheading these movements. The
recent developments however reflect another paradigm shift. At
the all-India level, the linguistic principle has already come to a stage
that it is almost abandoned obliquely. The Telangana, Vidharbha,
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bundelkhand and Harit Pradesh demands are
reflective of this pattern where internal colonialism and development–
backwardness are the major issues. Even the homeland concept is
also no more an important consideration. There is a perhaps a new
realisation that no single basis can inform reorganisation of states in
the current stage of globalised India polity. An eclectic approach which
will ensure — (a) nation state concerns, (b) administrative concerns
(c) democracy concerns and (d) diversity concerns — would be the
new paradigm for federal politics in a changing India.
Notes
* I am grateful to Professor Suhas Palsikar, University of Pune, for his
incisive critique and erudite comments on the draft of this chapter.
The other comments came from the participants in the workshop on
‘Interrogating State Reorganisation’ which was organised at Jawaharlal
Nehru University. I have tried to address them as far as practicable.
1. For a discussion, see Nag (2000).
2. Ibid.
3. ‘White Paper on Indian States’, 1950, para 147, cited in ibid.: 5.
4. Article 243 of the Constitution of India. For a discussion, see Austin
(1966: 186–207).
5. Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, vol. II, Government of India,
New London, 1930, para 38.
6. ‘Memorandum of Naga National Council to His Majesty’s Government
and the Government of India’, 20 February 1946.
7. T. Sakhrie, General Secretary, Naga National Council, in a write-up on
Naga homeland.
8. Dr Ram Subhag Singh in the Lok Sabha while debating on the Nagaland
Statehood Bill, Proceedings of the Lok Sabha, vol XLIV, 1–12 August 1960,
Government of India, Delhi.
9. Raghunath Singh in ibid.
10. C. K. Bhattacharjee in ibid.
11. ‘Memorandum Submitted to the Prime Minister of India’, New Delhi,
ABSU, 22 October 1987.
12. Press Release by ABSU, Kokrajhar, 1987.
13. Ibid.
14. ‘Constitution of ABSU’, Kokrajhar, 1987, p. 2.
15. Ibid.
16. Myron Weiner (1988) saw the such demands as the practice of son of
the soil theory as was in Assam while Dipankar Gupta (1989) saw such
political practice as nativism as in Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

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Chakladar, Snehamoy. 2004. Sub-regional Movement in India with Reference to
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Delhi: Oxford University Press.
 11
Assam through the Prism
of Reorganisation Experience
Ivy Dhar

The State Reorganisation Commission (SRC) created separate

linguistic states of India. However, in the process of executing the
plan, it sharpened dormant ethnic identities. The tribes, residing in
the hills areas of north-east India, thought that the reorganisation
criterion applied to other states of India could be also applied for the
division of Assam. The ethnic aspiration of tribals came forth during
the implementation of the reorganisation plan, though at that time,
their demand did not have a strong linguistic base. Conflict arose
between ethnic majority and minorities or tribals and the issue of
state reorganisation became much larger than just territorial division
—it assumed the image of ethnic identity representation.
This chapter examines the reorganisation experience of Assam.
Debates on reorganisation have been going on since the 1950s but it
was finally implemented in the 1970s. From holding the North-east
frontier region within the territorial boundary of Assam since colonial
annexation to the culmination of the Federal Plan (1972) when Assam
was divided into different north-east states, the journey has passed
through several rough patches. The chapter begins with a discussion
on the approach towards the frontier areas of Assam in the colonial
and post-colonial period. Being a border state, Assam has been treated
differently in comparison to other states. When the rest of India had
the privilege of expressing their preference for reorganisation, no such
preferences were encouraged in this region, regardless of its
multilingual
character. It may be argued that the pressures of linguistic
integration of Assamese and tribal population, in order to keep
them together, had eventually prepared Assam for reorganisation.
Even after Assam gave away most of its tribal land, reorganisation
remained a debatable issue and there have been recurring demands
for adjustment of territorial boundary corresponding to fulfilment
of ethnic identities.
 Assam through the Prism of Reorganisation Experiencem

Reorganisation is not a post-colonial experience for Assam. It has

been experimented long before. The British had receded and expanded
its territorial boundary several times to suit their administrative
convenience and imperial interests. The adjoining hill areas1 and parts of
East Bengal2 were included within the administrative unit of Assam
with the possible interest of maximising revenue extraction and
expansion of colonial jurisdiction over the surrounding areas of Assam.
After independence, the hills remained within Assam as recommended
by the Bordoloi Sub-committee (1947).3 The centre did not want to
separate the hills, explaining that border states like Assam needed to
be resourceful and stable and if it was divided into smaller units, there
could be a threat of de-stabilisation. The argument for smaller and
more homogenous administrative units of Indian provinces which
was first proposed in the Montague-Chelmsford Report (1918) was
not envisioned for Assam. The idealism of integration and
administrative
needs of stability together went against taking any decision for
territorial divisions.
The SRC also adopted similar views; it proposed that Assam
maintains
its multiracial, multilingual and multiethnic character. The
SRC’s stand on Assam led to a debate between the hill people and
the plains Assamese; the hills were dissatisfied with the SRC
proposition
of territorial unity of hills and plains, while the plains Assamese
strongly favoured it. But there was hardly any recommendation by
the Commission on how to maintain the unity with such broad ethnic
differences between the hills and the plains. The Assamese middle
class which at that time were much more articulate and organised in
comparison to tribals, took upon itself the task of integrating ethnic
groups. It had been propagating the idea of standardising the Assamese
language as the common language for Assam. Fundamentally, a link
language between the diverse language groups was needed so that
the idea of integration holds strong. Within a span of a decade of the
Indian states reorganisation, Assam formulated its language policy
declaring Assamese as the state official language (1960). The timing
was not appropriate as the reorganisation issue was still fresh in the
minds of the hill people. Pushing for a purposeful integration led to
further tensions and as a result, the hill tribes strongly demanded
separation of hill areas of north-east India from Assam.
The British system of keeping the hills and the plains intact through
a policy of non-interference could not provide an example to post-independence
Assam. The measures for integration were perceived
 m IvyDhar

as interference because the tribals valued their independence from

the plains. Consequently, the central government had to bring up
the reorganisation plan for Assam, which was deliberately avoided
earlier. Before a discussion on the reorganisation debate, the policy
for the north-east frontier area is briefly discussed. This will help to
understand the complexity of the situation in Assam and why there
was a stress on integration.

Colonial and Post-colonial Policy

for the Frontier: Transforming from the
Philosophy of Alienation to Integration
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British had completed
the annexation of the hill tracts located between Bengal and Burma,
surrounding the areas of Assam. They eventually called the region
as ‘North East Frontier’ and were content to administer the frontier
region more as a territorial appendage rather than an integral
administrative
unit (Bhaumik 1998: 310). In their dealings with the so-called
frontier peoples of north-east India, they did not exert pressure upon
them to adopt colonial administrative practices. Unlike the plain areas
of Assam, the colonial administration let the frontier function under
very loose administrative control. It did not even allow the plains to
meddle with the hill areas and practiced a policy of segregating the
hills and plains people. The Inner Line Regulation passed in 1873
established a virtual boundary along the foothills, and then under the
Government of India Act of 1935, the hills were placed either under
excluded4 areas (Naga hills, Lushai hills, North Cachar hills and North
East Frontier Agency) or partially excluded areas (Garo hills, Mikir
hills and Khasi-Jaintia hills).
The excluded areas had exclusive tribal population while the
partially
excluded areas had mixed populations, both tribal and non-tribal.
Both the areas were excluded from being part of provincial and federal
legislatures and so they did not experience democratically elected
institutions. It was supposed that the tribals remained so isolated
that it is unnecessary to engage them in the complicated concept
of modern governance. The concerned provincial governors were
given the responsibility to look after the day-to-day administration of
these areas. In this way, the people of the north-east, except the plain
areas of Assam, felt only an indirect impact of colonial domination.
The British wanted to keep the tribal at a distance from the growing
Indian nationalist movement. Lord Hardinge, the Governor General,
expressing his opinion on the frontier areas said that ‘we consider
our future policy should be one of loose political control, having as
its object the minimum of interference. To abstain from any line of
action or inaction as the case may be, this may tend to inculcate in their
minds any undue sense of independence’ (Hussain 1993: 352–53).
Consequently, the political status of the hills and the
administration
of the hill people remained vague. They were neither considered
independent nor were brought under an integral administration. The
colonial administration established only a superficial link between
mainland India, the Brahmaputra plains and hills of the north-east
by stretching the name of British India up to the frontier while at
the same time acting as barrier that prevented any socio-cultural and
political interactions beyond the Brahmaputa valley. As a result, no
common ideology could develop between the Brahmaputra valley
and its surrounding hill areas. The British had adopted a policy of
‘alienation’ to keep out of any trouble between ethnic communities in
the region. There are many such examples, when tensions over land
rights arose between the immigrant Muslims and the Assamese, the
British administration brought up the ‘line system’5 to segregate areas
for indigenous and immigrants settlements.
While crafting the post-colonial state of India, the nationalist
leadership
did not want to keep any residue of alienation in the tribal areas.
They felt that their foremost task in the north-east was to integrate the
hills, both with the heartland of Assam— the Brahmaputra valley
—and the Indian mainland. This was not a matter of territorial
unification;
rather, there was a strong need for psychological integration.
The task was not easy. Both Ambedkar and Nehru acknowledged the
glaring distinction between the mainstream and tribal societies. While
extending constitutional measures to the north-east, it was necessary
to undertake certain protective measures. The centre was advocating
views as ‘we should avoid introducing too many outsiders into the
tribal territory’ although ‘some technical personnel from outside may
be needed in the beginning of their development’. 6 By the proclamation
in the First Schedule of the Constitution of India, the north-east region
was integrated as a united part of the territory of Assam. Such a step
was preceded by a planned study made by the Bordoloi Committee
so that all political, territorial and administrative adjustments made
within the Indian union do not fall short of people’s aspiration. The
hills were not to be excluded. However at the same time, it was
necessary to ensure that their affairs were not much interfered by the
plains people.
The Bordoloi Sub-committee co-opted two members from each of
the hill districts of Assam but no member was nominated from the
Sadiya, Balipara, Lakhimpur and Tirap frontier tracts. The members
of the committee toured the hill areas to find out the viewpoints of
various tribes and how they wanted to be represented in the Indian
union. The hill leaders submitted petitions enlisting their demands
on economic, political, administrative, cultural and educational
matters. After studying their views thoroughly, the Bordoloi
Subcommittee submitted its report where it argued that ‘all the tribes of
the province other than Assam, whether living in the plains or in the
partially excluded tracts, should as a whole be treated as minority’
(Singh 2004: 172). It recommended for declaring the hills as scheduled
areas without making any alteration in the territorial combination
of hills and plains of Assam. The Sixth Schedule was finally taken
up which made all the hill districts of Assam autonomous with their
respective district councils. This Schedule did not include the plains
tribe areas of Assam, perhaps because the committee thought that
plains tribal were assimilated with the Assamese community and
drawing a line of distinction would reverse the process.
Analogous to the background, which was uneven, Assam and the
adjoining hill areas remained a single political unit. The national
political
ethos was dominated by the need for integration of the hill areas.
Jawaharlal Nehru lamented that the struggle for independence
experiencedby millions of Indian people did not extend to the tribal areas,
chiefly the frontier areas. The result was while the rest of the India
was psychologically prepared for changes in India, the frontiers were
not prepared; rather they were prepared to go the other way by the
British officers (Singh n.d.: 18).
The hills evolved from the colonial policy of separate
administration
to the post-colonial policy of dual administration. Development
and law and order were subjects of the Indian state while autonomy
was given to the tribals to make their own laws on management of
land, forests, customs and traditions under the administration of
district
councils. The plan was accepted only half-heartedly by the hills
they desired for being an enclave as in the past. The Nagas had already
demanded full statehood, and some tribes began questioning why it was
necessary to integrate with Assam in order to integrate with India.
SRC's Rationale of Retaining Assam
as a Single State
The SRC was constituted for developing a federal plan in order to
preserve the homogeneity of Indian provinces, facilitate the
integration
process, maintain the stability of the regions and also protect the
national interests. The SRC argued that forming of linguistic states
could bring a national homogeneity because linguistic states ‘is the
only national basis for restructuring the states as it reflects the social
and cultural pattern in well-defined regions of the country’ (Barpujari
1998: 3). This was also strengthened by the fact that there has been
a phenomenal development of regional languages in the nineteenth
and twentieth century. The idea of linguistic redistribution of states
has been put forward by the Indian National Congress (INC), in its
various sessions since 1905. In its Nagpur Session in 1920, the Congress
recommended that ‘time has come for the redistribution of provinces on
linguistic basis’ (ibid.: 1). However, while many state legislatures
supported the implementation of the SRC’s linguistic reorganisation
plan, the Legislative Assembly of Assam raised its voice against the
implementation of the plan in the north-east. The experience in the
north-east was different on the language issue. While for the rest of
India it acted as a cementing force, here it was the other way.
Bishnu Ram Medhi, the Chief Minister of Assam (1950–1957),
stated that:
in any case, we do not favour reorganisation of states on the basis of
language alone. There are so many dialects prevalent among the hills
that if linguistic basis were pursued to its logical conclusion, every
range in the hills would have to be framed into a separate state. Once
the claim for language as the criteria for reorganisation of state is
conceded it would be difficult to resist the force of disintegration,
particularly in a state like Assam which it is feared would fall into pieces
(Goswami 1997: 44).

In March 1955, the Asom Sahitya Sabha (ASS)7 decided to send a

delegation to the SRC. It placed a memorandum 8 stating that the
political
division of Assam, based on language criterion, was unnecessary.
It would be rather more appropriate if some of Assam’s neighbouring
areas, which were historically a part of it, should be again merged
together.
Civil societies in Assam have a phenomenal strength of public
support as they have played a historical role from preparing peasant
voices against colonial laws to giving shape to the freedom movement.
The people of the Brahmaputra plains and specifically the ethnic
Assamese supported the opinion of its leaders. It was being questioned
that if the colonial rulers could manage to administer Assam as a single
political unit, then why there was a need for reorganisation which
would rather be a reversal to the process of integration? Whether is
it not true that hill areas were better represented than in colonial rule
with adequate safeguards being provided under the Sixth Schedule,
which vested them with legislative powers that was denied by the
colonial government?
Legislative rights were only a partial fulfilment— the hills wanted
a fair chance of representation that was still being denied to them.
Williamson Sangma of the Eastern India Tribal Union (EITU) wrote to
the SRC in 1954 that there had been no political, social and cultural ties
between the people of the plains and the hills. Apart from endeavours
made by the Assamese to impose their language and culture on the
hillmen, they were trying to dominate the hills. There was a large gap
between the plains and hillmen with regard to economic development,
representation in legislature and in public service with huge share of
it being accrued by the Assamese (Barpujari 1998: 14).
There were demands pouring in for the formation of separate
states and the combinations of such proposals were not necessarily
based on linguistic criterion. Proposals were made for the formation
of Kamtapur state consisting of Goalpara, Garo Hills, Coochbehar
Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri. Another alternative demand was put
forward for the constitution of a Purbanchal state comprising Cachar,
Tripura, the Mizo hills, the Naga hills and North Eastern Frontier
Agency (NEFA). Along with the hills, the Barak valley that largely had
Bengali residents also demanded territorial separation from Assam.
The authority of Assamese leadership was shrinking as new leadership
emerged from other ethnic groups.
The SRC did not favour any demand for the division of the state
or the formation of separate states for the hills because such demands
had little linguistic manifestation. It maintained its earlier position
that the territorial division shall not accrue much benefit. It would
rather add to the cost of administration. Apart from the factor of cost,
coordination of policies between India, Assam and the hill areas and
also coordination between the hill districts themselves will become
more difficult. The hill districts of Assam were land-locked and so
it would not be a suitable strategy to separate them from the plains.
The commission was making a careful attempt to keep border states like
Assam resourceful rather than dividing them into smaller units. The
state of Assam, following the State Reorganisation Act of 1956, did
not undergo any change, and this had many reactions.
The members of the Assam Legislative Assembly had mixed
response.
Hareshwar Das, member from Goalpara district, said that
‘language no doubt plays an important role, but the main
consideration
should be promotion of unity, security and prosperity of India
as a whole’. Moinul Haque Chaudhary pointed out that ‘the best
solution was to have Hindi as the lingua franca and local languages
to be used in transacting court, business and in primary and
secondary
schools’. However, Ranendra Mohan Das felt that ‘Assamisation
policy followed by the Assam government after independence
greatly disturbed the other linguistic minorities living in Assam’
(Goswami 1997: 44). Minority organisations like the Assam Provincial
Jamait-Ulemar did not support the demand that Assam should be
reorganised on linguistic basis. Many were worried that the issue
of the implementation of official language in Assam was still not
resolved. The SRC may have given various reasons to keep Assam
intact but gave no solution on how the various hill districts of Assam
would communicate without a consesus on a common language.
The language question in Assam remained a controversy as ethnic
groups were not satisfied without any solution for dealing with the
diverse language issue. The Asom Sahitya Sabha was however satisfied
with the stand of the commission.
The reorganisation experience of India had definitely made a
phenomenal effect and opened the Pandora box for north-east India
and Assam. The linguistic determination of Indian states gave hope to
Assamese leaders for pursuing integration under the banner of ‘Greater
Assam’. The Assamese leadership, which had categorically rejected
linguistic reorganisation, had otherwise thought that language could be
instrumental in bringing political and cultural unity. They felt insecure
of tribal aspirations that were gradually coming to the forefront and
hence, securing Assamese as the official language of Assam was
assumed necessary. The tribal communities were uncomfortable with
the way Assam sought to maintain its unity. Consequently, conflict
among the ethnic leaders on the issue of representation in ‘Greater
Assam’ was quite evident.
Retreat from 'Greater Assam': Hills Moving
towards Political Disintegration
in the 1960s and 1970s
The tribal leaders expressed anxiety over the predominance of
Assamese language in the region and started to assess future limitation
in comparison to their Assamese counterparts. In the 1960s, areas
dominated by tribal or linguistic minority had strongly protested and
showed resentment against the imposition of Assamese language, and
sometimes the resentment was directed towards the Assamese
community.The hills united under the All Party Hill Leaders Conference
(APHLC) to challenge the ethnic Assamese leadership. During that
period, tribal dissent was primarily based on the language issue, though
consciousness of language may not have surfaced proportionately
across all tribes. They had a common fear of getting dominated
by the plains people and becoming culturally subservient to an
advanced language group. Some had said, ‘as long as tribals remained
with Assam their destiny lay in the hands of the Assamese’ (Barpujari
1998: 19). The state leadership failed to pacify the tribal concerns and
supported the one-sided language policy.
Nilmoni Phukan, ex-MLA, had stated that:

all the languages of different communities and their culture will be

absorbed in Assamese culture. I speak with rather authority in this
matter
regarding the mind of the people that this state government cannot
nourish any other language in the province. When all state affairs will
be conducted in Assamese, it will stand in good stead for hill people to
transact their business in Assamese with their Assamese brethren.9

The hills consistently protested against the state government’s

language policy and accused it as a measure to push for ‘Assamisation'
of hill people. Their belief was made stronger by examples of
hostile attitude and crippling policy towards the District Councils and
rapid introduction of the Assamese language in schools and district
administration. The hill people saw the Assamese acting through state
administration as the ruling group that treated the tribes as ‘hewers
of wood and drawers of water’ (Goswami 1997: 36). Challenging the
use of Assamese language in the NEFA areas, Hindi was being
introduced
in schools. Despite several efforts like delegations being sent
by the ASS to convince the tribal leaders for acceptance of Assamese
as the official language, there was no success.
 The Pataskar Commission (1966) report brought more pain to hill
people. The report referred to the hill districts as a ‘series of economic
islands’ joined only by the plains. It concluded that the hills are
dependent on the plains for their development and the prospects of both
will depend largely on interchange. But looking at the gap created
between the hills and plains due to neglect and isolation of the hills,
integration was hardly possible.10 The hill tribes began questioning
the validity of the Sixth Schedule, of the Indian Constitution. The
exclusive rights of hillsmen, as claimed in Sixth Schedule had no
weight because their every possibility of development depended on
the plains. The suspicion of hills of being dominated by plains grew
large and the Assamese leadership thought that the success of
centralisation
of language could be once again applied to pacify the hills.
The Executive Committee of the Asom Sahitya Sabha put forward a
proposal (September 1967) that Assamese should be introduced as the
medium of instruction in two Universities of Assam— the Gauhati
University and Dibrugarh University— and measures should be taken
for the publication of books and other literary materials in Assamese.
This time, the hills were not at all convinced by the argument that it
was not a move to hurt the sentiments of any ethnic section, and was
rather a way to develop Assamese as the common and link language.
The atmosphere in the north-east region was charged with tensions
and controversies. The APHLC demanded strongly for hill states. The
hills finally received a sign of relief when the much-awaited political
commitment by the central government for the territorial division of
Assam was announced.
The centre proposed a ‘Federal Plan’ for the formation and
administration
of north-eastern states on 13 January 1967. The political
leadership
as well as civil society organisations of Assam protested that
such a proposal was impractical and would lead to further tendencies
of dissent; that the reconstitution of Assam would be against its
historical
and cultural development. The Asom Sahitya Sabha observed a
protest
day on 11 February 1967 disapproving the formation of hill states.
The Sabha sent a memorandum to the central government reiterating
its humble request for giving up the Federal Plan and resolving the
various
issues of hill people through constitutional measures. It
recommended
that if the hill people were not satisfied with the content of
the Sixth Schedule, there could be further amendments incorporated
in the Schedule. The people of the Autonomous Districts could be
given wider scope for social, economic and political development
whereas division of Assam would pose a threat to India’s national
security and even break the emotional integration of the people. The
Assamese leaders widely protested that ‘it was not mere reorganisation
or division of Assam but destruction of Assam, and termed it as
undemocratic and unconstitutional’ (Raatan 2004: 36–37).
The Government of India however acted in favour of the APHLC
and five states and two Union Territories were carved out of Assam.
The Naga Hill District had already been separated from the state of
Assam in 1963 and it was made a full-fledged state. The Khasi, Jaintia
and Garo Hills were separated from Assam and formed into the state
of Meghalaya (1972). The NEFA, now known as Arunachal Pradesh,
earned the status of Union Territory. Mizoram became a Union
Territory
and states of Tripura and Manipur were also carved out. All the
newly-formed states and union territories including Assam, Manipur,
Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura and Arunchal Pradesh were
placed under the North Eastern Council (NEC) in August 1972.
The discussion above is not as simple as to assume that the
campaign
for Assamese language was the only determining factor in the
reorganisation of Assam. However, pushing for language integration
was the breaking point of the pressure that was building up in the
hills. The hill state movement gained impetus under the leadership
of APHLC; the party had drawn huge support from the hill people in
the general election of 1962 and 1967. The involvement of APHLC
in the politics of Assam, which until the 1950s was mostly
dominated
by the Congress, was a very strong destabilising force for the
idea of ‘Greater Assam’. The hill party leaders desired to get positions
of power, which was held largely by the Assam Pradesh Congress,
in undivided Assam. The extremist activities gaining momentum
in Mizoram and Nagaland districts were watersheds that changed
forever the attitude of the people and the the centre towards Assam.
Militant battle waged for sovereignty of Mizoram and Nagaland had
persuaded the centre to carve a policy for satisfying the aspiration
of the hill people. Separate statehood to the hills would divert the
attention of the people as they would get involved in fulfilling their
dreams of a new state.
Fernandes had rightly pointed that control of resource is a very
crucial
factor for conflicts in a region. As there are unequal power
relations
between tribal and non-tribal communities or between various
tribal communities, they struggle to control the limited resources.
Land or any basic sustainability resource lay in the crux of these
struggles although such struggles appear as cultural conflict (Fernandes
2005: 90). Their struggles imitate one another and it is often seen that
ethnic consciousness among smaller communities emerges due to the
reduced distances with the dominant communities, in terms of both
socio-cultural and economic space. The hills tribes of Assam, who were
facing land alienation since colonial times, did not wish to fall again
into the trap where non-tribals could be in a position to subordinate
them. The imposition of Assamese language would make passage for
such control.
The reorganisation of Assam and fulfilling demands of hill tribes
had repercussions among the plains tribal. The birth of the Plains
Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) in 1967 was in fact a response to the
reorganisation of the state. The emergence of hill states emboldened
the Bodos to strongly assert their demand for statehood. The Bodos
argued that they were numerically stronger than the Nagas, Mizos,
Khasis and Garos, and so ‘if they (hill areas) can be a separate state,
why not us (Bodos)’ (Chanda 1989). It also alarmed the Assamese
leadership to harden its stand and try to keep hold on the remaining
parts of Assam.

The Plains–Tribal Dissent in

Post-reorganisation Phase
The PTCA and the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) 11 emerged as the
mouthpiece for plains tribal. Numerically, the Bodos are the largest
plains tribe and so the plains tribal leadership was almost
representational
of this tribe. The Bodos were politically well-equipped to
lead because they resided largely in the Brahmaputra valley and
therefore
had been a witness to the politics of the valley. The PTCA
boycotted
the parliamentary elections of 1967 and bye-election of 1968
from Kokrajhar district of Assam. The Bodos were also involved and
influenced by civil society organisations like Asom Sahitya Sabha and
they too formed a similar organisation, the Bodo Sahitya Sabha (BSS). 12
The BSS, a literary-cultural organisation of Bodo language
community,
through a peaceful movement in 1968, pressurised for the
introduction
of Bodo language as a medium of instruction up to secondary
stage of education in Bodo-populated areas. The government conceded
this demand though earlier, this provision was only available up to
primary education.
In the late 1960s, and more prominently after the reorganisation in
1970s, the rift with the Assamese identity had shifted from hill tribes
to plains tribe. The situation worsened when the state government
agreed to execute the demands raised by the ASS for introduction
of Assamese as the medium of instruction in the two universities of
Assam in 1972. Immediately after this declaration, the Assam
Linguistic
Minorities Rights Commission (ALMRC) was set up. Charan
Narzary, the PTCA General Secretary, became its Vice-President. The
ALMRC, with the full support from the PTCA, fought in favour of
retention of English as the medium of instruction in the universities
of Assam. The political atmosphere was already very tense because
of the introduction of North East Reorganisation Act in 1972, and
the medium of instruction issue gave a further fillip to the fears of the
plains tribal. Though voices against the arbitrary proposal echoed from
the hill areas of north-east India, these areas however now moved on
with their new political units whereas the plains tribal were culturally
left all alone. However, they were not all alone.
The only two hill districts— Mikir and North Cachar Hills— that
remained in the territorial unit of Assam were also not happy about
the implementation of Assamese as the sole medium of instruction in
the two universities. They held a conference on 18 February 1973 and
submitted a memorandum to the then prime minister complaining that
‘the Assamese junta are determined to “Assameise” them by forcing
Assamese upon them and wiping out their own language and culture
which they cherish to develop’.13 These two hill districts had opposed
the idea of a separate hill state when other hill areas were asking for
separation. However now, they too felt insecure of their culture and
identity in the territory of Assam. Opposition also came from the
Misings tribes who wanted Mising language to be used in educational
institutions. Language monopoly in educational institutions could
cripple the tribal urge for development and so they responded by
initiating
a movement for a separate state and separate language identity.
The PTCA, with active support from the ABSU, started demanding
for ‘Udayachal’ state in December 1973. Simultaneously, the BSS
launched a Roman script for Bodo language movement and wanted
to discontinue the use of Assamese script for the Bodo language (it did
not have its own script). The state Congress, the Assamese press and
the ASS were all disturbed by the double strategy of political
movement
for a separate state and the cultural movement. The script issue
was resolved as the centre intervened to suggest Devnagari script for
Bodo language, which was accepted by the BSS.
The Bodo pressure group had successfully countered the Assamese
pressure group by demanding for a separate status for Bodo language,
away from the Assamese language identity. It had successfully
pressurised
the government to adopt the Bodo language as a medium of
instruction, to accept it as a Modern Indian Language (MIL) at the
higher secondary and graduate level and as the Official Language of
Assam. The government found enough justification and also perhaps
considered it a milder demand compared to the demand for a separate
state. The Bodo language earned the status of Associate Official
Languagein 1984 for Bodo-dominated district of Kokrajhar and Udalguri
sub-division of Darrang district. Eventually, Bodo language was adopted
as the Associate Official Language of Assam. Another long-drawn
battle by the BSS that finally came to an end was the inclusion of Bodo
language (2003) in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India.
Fulfillment of few cultural demands did not diminish the risk of the
division of Assam. The ABSU had been able to draw support from the
Bodo community in their demand for a separate state. Public protests
and slogans as ‘Divide Assam Fifty-fifty’ rose in high pitch in the 1980s.
It created ethnic tensions in Assam, which became very violent with
the emergence of Boro Security Force (BrSF), an extremist organisation.
The Congress government in Assam, through the central
government,
negotiated for a settlement on issues of autonomy in Bodo
Accord (1993). The Bodo Autonomous Council (BAC) was formed
by this accord. Peace, as expected, still did not come after the signing
of the accord. The Bodo leadership was worried about the superficial
autonomy as various clauses of the accord indicated dependency on the
state government. The extremist groups resorted to ethnic cleansing in
and around those villages of Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts that
were not included under the accord. The Bodos were brought to the
negotiating table many times and eventually, the Bodoland Territorial
Council or the BTC (2003) was formed. However, the non-Bodo tribes
felt insecure because of the expansion of Bodo identity and feared that
it would overshadow and marginalise them. They expressed their
dissatisfactionover the creation of the BTC. There was sharp reaction
and protest among various other tribal groups demanding the same
privilege. The Koch–Rajbonshis people, historically belonging to
the same stock as the Bodos, now classed as Other Backward Caste
(OBC), started building alliance with all non-Bodo communities who
were opposed to the creation of the BTC. The Bodos however saw
such demands as an encroachment of their political space that they
had secured after a hard struggle.
The tribal organisations opposed the government concessions
being given to a particular tribal language group which had lobbied
for them and this they felt threatened other tribal minority language
groups. There was continuous pressure on the state to accommodate
demands put forward by different organisations led by the Deuri,
Rabha, Mising, Karbi, Dimasa and Tiwa tribes of Assam. The illusion
of a composite Assamese identity had already been broken;
likewise
the demand for a separate identity from different tribal groups
from the plains have challenged the compositeness of larger Bodo
identity. The Bodo movement slowly left the other plains tribal behind,
or it may be that others felt discomfort in associating with Bodo
identity.
The Rabha movement demanded a separate Rabha Hasong
(Rabhaland) autonomous state within Assam on the south bank
extending from Jyoramukhi in Goalpara district to Rani in Kamrup,
together with an autonomous district in Darrang on the north bank
and autonomous councils in yet other four districts holding Rabha
population. The experiment of the accord was also extended to other
tribal settlements and its failure did not discourage the government
from signing more such accords. The Rabhas, the Mishings and the
Tiwas also got their respective autonomous councils.
Assam’s population is varied in terms of language and other
socio-cultural features. The diversity is a result of continuous
migration.
Linguistic conflict in Assam is not just related to the number
of language groups and their relative size but also the degree of
relation
and distinction among them. The relation of the Assamese with
the plains tribal became very complex and controversial because
of the unnecessary pressure of integration of plains tribal identity with
Assamese identity. As the Bodo language gained recognition and
stretched its influence over other plains tribal, the effect was almost
the same. The expanding role of the Bodo intellectuals also put a
challenge
to Assamese leadership in terms of their influence on the people,
state and government. Ethnic problems and demands for further
reorganisation had almost reached a saturating point. Resolving the
issue by providing autonomy rights over cultural matters were seen a
measure to restrict further political division of Assam.
Linguistic Integration in Multilingual States
The idea of integration for India was very significant at the time of
independence and as the trouble spots in the country multiplied, the
Indian ruling classes strongly asserted its need. Political culture sets
precedent on how certain features are held more closely than others
as integrative measures, even if it means relegating certain
interests.
In the process of bringing integration across ethnic communities
of Assam, the Assamese middle class had overshadowed the presence
of smaller nationalities of Assam and shrinked their scope for progress.
It is highly unexpected that the Assamese middle class or any middle
class would not retain their hegemony even if it led to further tensions
in the region. The rule of the ethnic majority is also established by the
democractic process. The electorate largely composes of this section
and hence, political leaders try to appease them by encouraging not
only the linguistic and cultural interests of the majority group but also
by distributing scarce resources among them. Since 1956, as scholars
explain, there was a growing sentiment across India of creating cultural
linguistic homogenity.14
There was however a complete silence on how the cultural linguistic
differences among the ethnic minority tribal and linguistic majority
population could be handled. It was assumed that the Sixth Schedule
would take care of such intricacies, as it assures scope of maintaining
customs and traditions of different tribes. But it was very difficult to
execute such co-ordination outside the Sixth Schedule areas,
especially
with respect to matters of state. The situation was worse for the
plains tribe because they were not even given appropriate protection
as Schedule Tribes. The only plan that the state leaders could think
of was to make Assamese as the state language in order to bridge the
cultural differences. Assertion of Assamese language as a measure for
integration restrained the tribal population in many ways and they saw
no space within the political boundary of Assam. The insecurity was
not just brewing among the tribal populace; other linguistic minorities
of the state were also apprehensive of their space. The Bengali
population
of Cachar, which had no ethnic resemblance to tribals, had joined
the protest with them and fought against the propagation of Assamese
as the state language. Eventually they started demanding Bengali as
the second official language of the state in Bengali-dominated Cachar
district of Assam. The Assam government had to consider such
demands. The government tried to address the language issue between
the Assamese and other linguistic minorities of the state. However,
its approach differed according to the exigencies of time.
In a limited political and economic space, interest groups may seek
to strengthen their claims by evoking ethnic relations among its
members
and creating tensions. The state, as an arbiter, has an important
role to play by proceeding with thoughtful actions that would lead to
the empowerment of the society. Since there is a natural connection
between the language spoken by a social group and their
empowerment,
all democratic states therefore must try to develop its wide
variety of languages. It is argued that by language ‘their accent, their
vocabulary, their discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and
are identified as members of this or that speech and discourse. From
this membership, they draw personal strength and pride, as well as
a sense of social importance and historical continuity from using the
same language as the group they belong to’.15 There are many
communities
in Assam whose mother tongues are different from the official
language. However, that should not be a barrier to the development
of such groups.
The Assam Official Language Act (1960) was criticised as being
a barrier to the advancement of the linguistic minorities. Provided
the fact that the constitution allows for provision of drawing separate
language policy for states, the main issue of dispute in Assam was
how a balance could be reached between officially adopted regional
language and the other minority languages. It was necessary to
complement
the language of administration with space for using minority
language in educational institutions as the medium of instruction. All
citizens have the right to primary education in their native tongue.
In democratic states, education is itself a preparation for citizenship.
After the reorganisation of the states in 1956, Articles 350 A and 350 B
were incorporated in the constitution which declares that it shall be
the endeavour of every state and local authority within the state to
provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother tongue at the
primary stage of education to children belonging to linguistic minority
groups.16
Several rounds of discussion were held among the state and national
representatives of the government on such issues. The meeting of Chief
Ministers of the States and Central Ministers, held on 10, 11 and 12,
August 1961, discussed the various dimension of linguistic integrity
along with safeguards of the diversity of languages and dialects of
minor language groups. It reflected on how states can respect the
use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction at various stages of
education, how links between different states and between different
regions within states are to be strengthened and how multilingual
states must proceed with the formulation and using of official
language.17 Assam’s discriminatory policies, incorporated in the early
post-independence decades of giving no space for minority language
development, had to be changed in the later decades.
Conclusion
The nationalist leadership promised the tribal population of north-east
India the benefits of maintaining autonomy and thereby tried gaining
confidence of the tribal societies. It tried to evolve a sanctioned
polity
from the segmented society of India by installing the practice of
representation in the new political order. The very idea of
representation
failed to develop as a democratic culture and rather, it became
a subject of political estrangement. During the anti-colonial struggle,
the regional leadership of Assam also grew simultaneously and tried
to supplement the national leadership by drawing homogeneity across
certain sections of the population. In the subsequent years of
independence,
the regional elite could gather enough strength and support to
establish language domination across smaller ethnic groups of Assam.
The idea of cultural autonomy of tribals remained detached from the
other complications of the increasing ethnic gap between tribals and
non-tribals.
The District Councils were constituted under the protective
provisions
of the Sixth Schedule to provide solutions to tribal autonomy.
However, its dependence on the plains did not allow them much
freedom. The tribal leaders started complaining of discrimination
towards the hill areas and accussed the plains people as an impediment
to their growth. The Assamese leadership tried to conceal such fissures
by pushing for cultural integration. The ‘one state one language’
formulawas viewed as Assamese chauvinist politics. Though
development
of the hills was not possible in isolation, yet any attempt made
to integrate them with the plains was seen with suspicion.
The implementation of linguistic reorganisations of Indian states
followed closely by the Official language Act of Assam gave a new
dimension to language politics in the state. The ethnic groups found
that there are sites where language could not only establish cultural
autonomy but could act as a weapon for exerting power. The tribes
were still in the nascent stage of development and hence, they learned
to react. However, they could not act on their own. The decision to
reorganise Assam, or rather north-east India, was unlike the reorganisation
of states in many other parts of India. In other areas, the
reorganisation plan evolved with sustained political mobilisation,
whereas redrawing boundaries in the north-east was more a
top-down
process (Barua 1990: 106). No tribes were consulted on the
territorial plan. The present problems between the tribes in several
north-east states are a proof of such limitations. They were all put
together without even knowing whether they can be together.
The reorganisation experience of Assam may not have brought
much good to the ethnic groups that remained within the political
territory of Assam. Yet this experience taught the regional leadership
of not pushing their cultural interests for any political benefits. The
state must definitely look into the matter on how cultural issues are
addressed and it is better to address such issues thoughtfully. Cultural
and linguistic diversities are features that cannot be avoided. Different
groups live together as a consequence of historical events and human
migrations; the development of diverse languages is critical for the
preservation of cultural heritage and identity.

Notes
1. The Garo, Khasi-Jaintia, Naga and Lushai hills were formally included
in Assam in 1874 when Assam was constituted as Chief Commissioner’s
province. Therefore, the hill tribal areas were neither a part of India nor
of Assam prior to the British colonisation of the region, though tribes had
trade relations with the neighbouring Brahmaputra valley. The Nagas, the
Mizos, the Khasis, the Garos, the Karbis and the Dimasa-Kachari tribes
had their own small states and culture, and remained almost secluded
due to their geographical isolation from the valley. Almost all the tribes
settled in the region in the remotest past and are undoubtedly the original
natives of Assam. Even in the non-tribal dominated Brahmaputra valley,
the Bodo-Kachari tribes were the first natives of the valley in the real sense.
See Hussain (1994: 279).
2. Sylhet district, which is presently in Bangladesh, was separated from Bengal
and added to Assam in 1874. Between 1895 and 1898, the Chittagong hill
were detached from Bengal and merged with Assam. In 1905, with the
partition of Bengal, Assam was completely merged with East Bengal. In
1921, as Assam became a Governor’s province, East Bengal was again
separated from Assam. However, Sylhet and Cachar remained within
Assam till independence. Finally through referendum, Sylhet became part
of East Pakistan in 1947.
3. An Advisory Committee on the tribal areas under the chairmanship of
Sardar Vallabbhai Patel was set up. The Advisory Committee for
convenience
further constituted a Sub-Commmittee under the chairmanship of
Gopinath Bordoloi. It was popularly known as the Bordoloi Committee.
 4. In the Government of India Act 1919, in continuation of the Scheduled
Districts Act of 1874, the hill areas were designated as ‘backward areas’.
The Simon Commission recommended the term ‘excluded’ instead of
using the term ‘backward’.
5. In 1916, the Deputy Commissioner of Nowgong (Assam) suggested the
‘line system’. Specified areas were divided into immigrants line (where
land would be allotted to immigrants only), mixed line (both indigenous
and immigrants could settle) and Assamese Line (only indigenous people
could settle).
6. Das discussed Ambedkar’s views on tribals in Assam, who unlike their
counterparts in India, were not Hinduised, rather their culture was quite
different from Hindus. The policy of avoiding complete assimilation was
propagated in ‘Nehru–Elwin model’ of tribal development and welfare.
See Das (2002: 73–74).
7. Asom Sahitya Sabha is a civil society organisation of yesteryears and
today, it is a mouthpiece of the Assamese leadership. The Sabha was
constituted in 1917 by like-minded Assamese intellectuals who wanted
to change the face of Assam by giving priority to the language, literature
and culture of Assam. In the Constitution of the Sabha, it declares itself as a
non-political organisation but as it has been involved in the socioeconomic
life of the people, it could not thoroughly disassociate itself from political
matters of the state.
8. The demands placed in the memorandum were: (a) that no part of the
state of Assam, as at present constituted, be taken away from it; (b) that
the NEFA be forthwith amalgamated with Assam; (c) that Coochbehar,
Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling be transferred to the state of Assam, subject to
the will of the people of these districts; (d) that the two part C states of
Manipur and Tripura be merged with Assam, subject to the will of their
people and with provisions for subvention from the Government of India;
and (e) that the ill-conceived plans to separate states on this defence
frontier like Purbanchal and Hill state be not countenanced (Goswami
1994: 43).
9. Assam Legislative Assembly Proceedings, Government of Assam, 1984,
pp. 581–82.
10. Comments in Rao (1976).
11. The PTCA could be considered as the first political organisation of the
Bodos formed under the chairmanship of Modoram Brahma. Although
the PTCA was a party for plains tribal, nevertheless there was Bodo
domination in the party. The ABSU was also formed in 1967 and it played
a vital role in the political life of the Bodos later on.
12. The Bodo Sahitya Sabha (BSS), as known as Boroni Tunlai Aphat in Bodo
language, was formed in 1952. It is said to have originated from the Bodo
Literary Club founded by a handful of elites working in government
offices
in Dhubri in 1950 for the upliftment of Bodo language and literature.
 The BSS also follows the same fundamental tradition of the Club. Yet it
concerns have extended to every aspects of social, cultural, economic as
well as political life of the Bodo people. It has been an umbrella organisation
for Bodo language groups, residing not only in Assam but also in
other states like West Bengal, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh,
Tripura, and country like Bangladesh and Nepal.
13. A memorandum demanding a separate state comprising the Mikir and
N. C. Hills and the contiguous tribal areas of Assam, submitted to the
Prime Minister of India, 9 June 1973.
14. Myron Weiner ideas of cultural linguistic homogenisation as state policy
have been discussed. When states were reorganised along the linguistic
lines, the regional language was used far more extensively. Chaklader
(2004: 31).
15. See Kramsch arguments in Mantero (2006: 26).
16. The concept of minority languages exposes the vulnerability of every
linguistic minority. Both the Indian and international law are based on
a premise that majority languages can prosper along with minority
languages.
Promotion and protection of minority languages is a matter of
legal obligation. The constitutional scheme of promotion and protection
of minority languages in India is apparently reasonable. However, a few
critics consider it inadequate, a few fear ‘linguistic fascism’ and many
feel frustrated from the many unresolved language controversies in
India. See Tyagi (2003: 22).
17. http://www.education.nic.in/cd50years/g/12/1N/121N0809.htm (accessed
2 May 2010).
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 About the Editors

Asha Sarangi is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies,

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her most recent publication
is an edited volume, Language and Politics in India (2009). She has
also published several articles in journals and edited volumes. Her
primary areas of research include the political and cultural economy
of development in modern India, identity and politics in South
Asia and more specifically the politics of linguistic nationalism in
modern India.

Sudha Pai is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, School of

Social Sciences, and Rector, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
She was also Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
Teen Murti, Delhi. Her research interests include state politics in
India, dalit politics, agrarian politics, globalisation and governance.
She has authored many books, the most recent being Developmental
State and the Dalit Question in Madhya Pradesh: Congress Response (2010).
 Notes on Contributors

Ivy Dhar is Assistant Professor at School of Development Studies,

Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD). Prior to this, she was Junior
Fellow with Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML)
and also worked with Higher Education Department, National
University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA).
She was a project leader of a study on ‘Foreign Education Providers
in India’, independently commissioned by British Council.She
completed her PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include tribal
development and politics, identity and inclusion, peace and conflict,
environmental and resource politics. She focuses on cross-cutting
issues of development in north-east India.

Rita Kothari is Professor at Mudra Institute of Communications,

Ahmedabad. Her publications include Translating India: The Cultural
Politics of English (2006) and The Burden of Refuge: Partition Experiences
of the Sindhis of Gujarat (2009). An acclaimed translator from Gujarati
and Sindhi, Kothari’s translations include The Stepchild: Angaliyat
(2004), Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women (2006)
and Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition (2009). She has also
co-edited Decentring Translation Studies: India and Beyond and Chutnefying
English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish (forthcoming). She is currently
working on a manuscript on communities living on the Indo–Pak
border in Kutch, Gujarat.

Nivedita Mohanty is an eminent historian and a PhD from Heidelberg

University. Her book entitled Oriya Nationalism: Quest for a United
Orissa, 1866–1936 (1982), published originally as a part of the series
on Indology by Heidelberg University, has earned wide acclaim as a
seminal work. An enlarged version of the same book (Oriya Nationalism:
Quest for a United Orissa, 1866–1956) was published in 2005. She has
co-authored The Eloquent Silence (2006) and has worked on ‘The
Impact of Depression of 1929 and the Growth of Socialism in Orissa’
while pursuing her PhD at IIT Kharagpur. As a senior research fellow
of the Indian Council of Historical Research (1997–1999), she worked
on ‘Dhalbhum: A Symbol of Harmony between the Brahmanic and
Tribal Traditions’, which gives an insight into the cultural heritage
of Jharkhand. An independent researcher, she is recognised today as
an authority on Regional Studies and a front-ranking scholar on the
modern history of Orissa and Jharkhand.

Sajal Nag is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the

Department of History, Assam University, Silchar. He is a well-known
scholar on the politics of sub-nationalism and secessionism in South
Asia. A Commonwealth Fellow (2004–2005) and Charles Wallace
India Trust Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of
Cambridge (2008), he is the author of books like Roots of Ethnic Conflict:
Nationality Question in North East India (1991), Nationalism, Separatism
and Secessionism (2000), Contesting Marginality: Ethnicity, Insurgency
and Subnationalism in North East India (2002) and Pied Pipers in North
East India: Bamboo Flowers, Rat Famine and the Politics of Philanthropy,
1881–2007 (2008). He is also considered an authority on the history
and politics of north-east India, a troubled region of South Asia.

Sudha Pai is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, School of

Social Sciences, and Rector, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
She was also Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
Teen Murti, Delhi. Her research interests include state politics in
India, dalit politics, agrarian politics, globalisation and governance.
She has authored many books, the most recent being Developmental
State and the Dalit Question in Madhya Pradesh: Congress Response (2010).

Ranabir Samaddar is Director of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research

Group, Kolkata, and belongs to the School of Critical Thinking. He
has pioneered along with others peace studies programmes in South
Asia, and has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the
context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of
Dialogue (2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights and
peace. His particular researches have been on migration and refugee
studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and
postcolonial
statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological
restructuring and labour control. He has authored a three-volume study
of Indian nationalism —Whose Asia Is It Anyway?: Nation and the Region
in South Asia (1996), The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from
Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999), and A Biography of the Indian Nation,
1947–1997 (2001). His recent political writings — The Materiality of
Politics (2007) and the just published The Emergence of the Political Subject
(2010) — have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth
of nationalism and the nation–state, and have brought to fore a new
turn in critical post-colonial thinking.

Nagindas Sanghavi has taught Political Science in various colleges of

Mumbai between 1950 and 1981. He has contributed articles to various
newspapers and magazines and has written several booklets dealing
with constitution and political affairs in India. He has concentrated
on the study of Gujarat and is the author of Gujarat: A Political
Analysis (1996) and Gandhi: The Agony of Arrival (2006). He has also
translated Rajmohan Gandhi’s book titled Patel: A Life (1994) into
Gujarati.

Asha Sarangi is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies,

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her most recent publication
is an edited volume, Language and Politics in India (2009). She has
also published several articles in journals and edited volumes. Her
primary areas of research include the political and cultural economy
of development in modern India, identity and politics in South
Asia and more specifically the politics of linguistic nationalism in
modern India.

K. Srinivasulu is Professor of Political Science at Osmania University,

Hyderabad, and has been Visiting Fellow at University of Oxford
and Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research
(ICSSR). His interests include political theory, agrarian and Dalit
movements, and public policy. He is presently researching on ‘the
Politics of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)’ and ‘State and Business
Relations in India’. His forthcoming book is Karamchedu, Chunduru
and Beyond: Dalit Movement in Andhra Pradesh.

Usha Thakkar is Honorary Director of the Institute of Research on

Gandhian Thought and Rural Development; Honorary Secretary of
Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya, Mumbai; and Vice-President
of Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan. She retired as Professor and
Head, Department of Political Science, Shreemati Nathibai Damodar
Thackersey Women’s University, Mumbai. Her research areas include
women’s studies, Gandhian studies and Indian politics. She has
coauthored
Women in Indian Society (2001) and Kautilya’s Arthashastra
(1980), and co-edited Culture and Making of Identity in Contemporary
India (2005), Politics in Maharashtra (1995), Zero Point Bombay:
In and Around Horniman Circle (2008) and Women’s Studies Series
(in Gujarati).

Louise Tillin is Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Newnham

College, University of Cambridge, and is due to join as Lecturer of
Politics at the India Institute, King’s College London.

Tharakeshwar V. B. is Associate Professor and Head at the

Department
of Translation Studies, The English and Foreign Languages
University, Hyderabad. He has published extensively both in English
and Kannada in the area of language politics, translation studies
and on the question of nation in colonial and post-colonial contexts
from an interdisciplinary perspective. He has handled a number of
research projects funded by various agencies in these areas and has
brought out three volumes of translation under the series ‘Classical
Kannada Texts in English Translation’ from Kannada University-
Hampi, India. He has been the Associate Editor of the Journal of
Karnataka Studies, and continues to be on its editorial board.
 Index
aboriginal tribes 262
Adivasi Mahasabha 226
adivasi politics 222
adivasis 115, 151, 219, 225–29, 235,
242–44
agitational politics, demobilisation
of 120
Agra Presidency 50
agrarian radicalism 51
Akali movement 11
Akbar Hydari–Naga National Council
(NNC) Agreement 270
Akola Pact 149
Alam, Javed 204
Ali, Rehmat 54
Ali, Syed Fazl 10
All Bodo Students Union (ABSU)
272–73, 293–95
All Hills Tribal Leader’s Conference
267
All India Tribal Writers Forum 242
All Party Hill Leaders Conference
(APHLC) 267–68, 291–92
All Utkal Adivasi Congress 226
Ambedkar, B. R.: Needs for Checks
and Balances: Articles on Linguistic
States 9; recommendation for
division of larger states 9–10;
Riddles of Hinduism 155; views
on linguistic states 35, 38
American (USA) model of federalism
60-61
Amrutara Santana (Mohanty) 220
Anderson, Benedict 166, 177, 192,
199
Andhra Maha Sabha (AMS) 171
Andhra Mahasabha Boundary
Committee
214
Andhra Pradesh 11, 15, 18, 21, 57, 76,
164, 170, 223, 254; demand for
creation of 6, 37; establishment
of States Reorganisation
Commission
55; formation of 51, 170,
172–74, 249, 258; language and
regional identities 99; public
education system 178; ‘visual’
capitalism 178
Andhra State Formation Bill 258
Anglo-Saxon culture 203
anti-colonial nationalism 190–91,
249; relation between Kannada
nationalism and 192-96
anti-feudal peasant struggle 171
anti-Kuki movements 275
anti-Oriya campaign 218, 227
anti-outsider riots 275
anti-refugee movement 275
anti-reservation protests 117
anti-terrorist operations 63
anti-zamindari struggle 172
Article 131 of Constitution of India
216
Article 350A of Constitution of India
238, 298
Article 350B of Constitution of
India 298
Article 370 of Constitution of India
55
Article 371 of Constitution of India
61, 252
Arunachal Pradesh 268, 275, 292
Aryan language 136
Asom Sahitya Sabha (ASS) 22, 287,
289, 291, 293
Assam: Bordoloi Sub-committee
(1947) 283, 286; civil society
 Interrogating Reorganisation of
organisations 291; colonial and
post-colonial policy for the
frontier
284–86; ethnic cleansing 295;
ethnic communities 285, 296;
ethnic tensions 295; Federal Plan
(1972) for division of 282, 291;
Greater Assam 290–93; Inner
Line Regulation policy 284;
language monopoly in
educational
institutions 294; official
language 267, 283, 289–90,
295, 298; plains–tribal dissent in
post-reorganisation phase 293–
96; policy of ‘alienation’ 285;
policy of dual administration
286; political disintegration in
1960s and 1970s 290–93; SRC’s
rationale of retaining Assam as
single state 287–89; territorial
boundary 282–83
Assam–Bengal Railway 51
Assamese–Bengal riots 56
Assamese script for Bodo language
294
Assam Hill Peoples Conference 268
Assam Linguistic Minorities Rights
Commission (ALMRC) 294
Assam Official Language Act (1960)
298
Assam Pradesh Congress 261, 292
Assam Provincial Jamait-Ulemar
289
Assam Reorganisation (Meghalaya)
Bill 268
Babri Masjid, demolition of 97
Backward Class movement 197,
201–2, 205
Baghel, Khubchand 94–95, 115
Bahujan Samaj 157
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 88,
118, 158
Bandhua Mukti Morcha 94
States
Bengal: famine (1866) 50; partition
of 50–51; Presidency 3, 50;
separation of Chittagong and
Chittagong Hill Tracts 51
Besant, Annie 6
Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) 88
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) 95–102,
151, 154; alliance with Shiv Sena
151–53, 156, 158; in Chhattisgarh
14; plans to create states between
1998–2000 108, 113; Ram
Mandir campaign 119; regional
division of votes/seats 73; social
and statehood movements 110;
support of statehood demands
111–12, 117, 120–22
Bhave Commission 91–92
Bhim Shakti 155
Bhopal Congress 75
Bhuyan, Udayanath 219
Bihar Provincial Congress Committee
224
Bijoylakshmi Kalapitha 225
BIMARU states 102
Bodo Accord (1993) 295
Bodo Autonomous Council (BAC)
295
Bodoland 15, 23, 57, 95, 268, 272–73,
275
Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC)
295
Bodo language 273, 293–96; as
official language of Assam 295
Bodo movement 12, 296
Bodo Sahitya Sabha (BSS) 293–95
Bodo Security Force 273
Bombay Presidency 3, 78, 191, 195,
197
Bordoloi Committee 285
Bordoloi Sub-committee (1947)
283, 286
Boro Security Force (BrSF) 295
Bose, Subhash 255
Boundary Agitation 231–32, 240

Boundary Commission 218, 229
Brahmin–Bania conflict 84
‘Brahmin conspiracy’ 202
Brahmi script 138
Brass, Paul 11
British Empire in India 51
British Indian Army 54
Brown, Judith 33
Bundelkhand 4, 15, 76, 95, 279;
formation of 72, 94; proposal for
creation of 17, 70, 72, 80
Cachar State Reorganisation
Committee
261, 264
capitalism, development of 165, 168
caste-based parties 13, 112
caste–class alliance 10
Ceiling Law 90
Census of India (1951) 259
Census Tracts 259
Central Statistical Organization
(CSO) 13
Chadda, Maya 13, 111
Chandrakar, Chandulal 95–96
Charter Act (1833) 50
Chatterjee, Partha 190, 199, 205
Chaudhary, Moinul Haque 289
Chavan, Y. B. 145, 149–50
Chhattisgarh Asmita Sangathan
Samiti (CAS) 97
Chhattisgarh Bhratir (brotherhood)
Sangh 94
Chhattisgarh, demands for creation
of 72- 73, 79, 96-97
Chhattisgarhi Brahmins 115–16
Chhattisgarh Mahasabha 94, 115
Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh
94
Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha 108
Chhattisgarh Rajya Nirman Manch
(CRNM) 94–96, 116
Chhattisgarh Rajya Sangarsh Morcha
(CRSM) 97–98
Index
Chhattisgarh State Creation
Campaign
95, 116
Chhattisgarh State Formation
Committee
94
Chhau Mahotsava 225, 236
Chief Commissioner’s province 50,
75, 253
Chin–Lushai Conference (1892) 50
Chipko movement 108
Choudhury, Nabakrushna 228, 231
Churhat Lottery scandal 93
civilian dimension of society 63
civil society 44, 117, 161, 165, 167,
175–76, 179, 291, 293
coalitional governments, formation
of 17
Cohn, Barnard 2
colonialism 49, 70, 100, 167–68,
177, 198–202, 279; territorial
consolidation of 3
Colonial State, interventions 2–4
common political community 71
communalisation 42; and language
politics 33, 35; rise of 33
communal politics 139
Communist Party of India (CPI)
117, 172
Communist Party of Soviet Union
40
Congress Working Committee (1949)
11, 149, 215, 258
Constituent Assembly 34, 40, 61, 75,
256–57, 262
Constitutional Amendment Bill, for
reorganisation of states 60
Constitution of India Act (27th
Amendment) 268
constructive competition 121
Coorg movement 12
counter-insurgency operations 63
cultural homogenisation 48, 178,
201
cultural movements, language-
based 5
cultural nationalism 34, 192, 195–98
Curzon, Lord 51
Dakshin Koshal 78
Dalit Panther movement 157
Dalits 82, 95, 102, 118, 151; politics
in Maharashtra 157–58
Dandakaranya 95
Dandekar, V. M. 159
Dar Commission 7, 35, 40, 148, 257
Daulatram, Jairamdas 134–35,
137–38, 141
de-colonisation 52
Delhi Durbar (1877) 54
democratic political forces 71
democratic politics, accommodative
model of 71
Deo, R. N. Singh 217–18, 223–24,
228, 232, 240
Desa Misrana Fandi (Amalgamation
Fund) 214
Deshpande, Rajeshwari 156
Devanagari script 129, 138–40; for
Bodo language 294
Doctrine of Paramountcy for the
Princely States 54
downward alliances 82
Drafting Committee of Indian
Constitution
8 Gorkhaland 12, 57, 95
Dravidra Munetra Khazagam
(DMK) 100
Eastern India Tribal Union (EITU)
267, 288
East India Company 54, 146
education, multilingual 41
Eighth Schedule 21, 42, 131, 134,
137, 242, 295
electoral politics 13, 17, 73, 82,
109-10, 113, 120, 145, 158- 60,
181; in Maharashtra 149–52
Embree, Ainslie 4
Emotional Integration Committee
(1962) 41–42
English Geetagalu (Srikantia) 202
Entry 17 of the State List 59
Entry 56 of the Union List 59
ethnic cleansing 295; types of 275
ethnic conflict management 110
Fact Finding Committee 159
factionalism, politics of 84–87;
within two-party competitive
system 87–93
farmers’ movement 153
Fifth Schedule 61
First Schedule 54–55, 285
Foreign National Movement 272,
275
Foucault, Michel 62, 64
Ganatantra Parishad 214, 217, 223,
228, 232, 240
Gandhidham 129, 132–33
Gandhi, Indira 36, 85, 89–91, 150,
154, 268, 277
Gandhi, Mahatma 147
Gandhi, Rajiv 92
gandi zehniyat 138
Gentlemen’s Agreement 174
Giri, V. V. 215
Glimpses of World History (Nehru) 35
Government of India Act (1935) 54,
253, 284
Government of the Union Territories
(Amendment) Act 268
Gowda, Deve 14
Greater Assam 290–93
Great Partition 53
Green Revolution 16, 57, 109, 179
gulabi channa relief money scandal
92
Gundappa, D. V. 196, 198, 202
Hall, Stuart 43
Hardinge, Lord 254, 285
Harit Pradesh 15, 57, 279
Hasan, Zoya 109
Hills Tribal Union 267
Hindi language 56, 135, 219
Hindu Mahasabha 78
Hindu–Muslim riots 151
Hindu nationalism 118, 121
Hindutva 96, 151, 153–54, 157, 194
Hirakud Dam project 215, 240
History of Hindu Imperialism (Swami
Dharma Theertha) 205
Hoenig, Patrick 62
homeland, concept of 274–75
hyper-governance 62
identity-based movements 108
Indian Councils Act (1861) 54
Indian federalism 61, 108, 111, 123,
242
Indian High Courts Act (1861) 54
Indian National Congress (INC) 4–5,
77, 147, 168, 197; adherence
to linguistic principles for re-
organisation of provinces 255;
backward class movement 197,
201–2; election manifesto 255–
58; linguistic redistribution of
states 287; Nagpur session 6,
19; and politics of factionalism
84–87; and politics of integration
in MP 82–84
Indian nationalism see anti-colonial
nationalism
Indian Penal Code 54
Indian Statutory Commission 255
Indicators and Backlog Committee
(1995) 159
Indus Valley Civilisation 141
Inner Line Regulations, Bengal
Eastern Frontier Regulation Act
(1873) 266
Inner Line Regulations policy 263,
284
Instrument of Accession 75
Inter-State Water Disputes Act
(1956) 60
Jaffrelot, Christophe 109
janapadas 69
Janata Party (JP) 91, 112, 114, 153
Jan Sangh 73, 83–91, 101
Jena, Niranjan 229
Jharkhand 222, 227, 279; adivasi
state 242; movement 225–26,
242; Oriya-speaking people as
minority in 234–38; scheduled
tribe and scheduled caste
population
109
Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)
108, 120
Joshi, Sharad 153
JVP Committee 7, 148, 257–58
Kaanadiyappas 203
Kandhamal violence 243
Kannada identity 191, 202–5;
movement
202; script 192
Kannada nationalism 21, 199–202;
cultural and political
reunification
of 196; relation with Indian
nationalism 192–96
Kannada Sahitya Parishat 195
Kanyakubja Brahmins 116
Karnataka 6, 10, 12, 193–94, 197;
language of education 199
Karnatakatwa 21–22, 193–94
Kaushik Committee 117
Kaviraj, Sudipta 190, 192, 200, 204
Khilnani, Sunil 33–35, 43
King of Mysore 196–97
King, Robert 32
Kisan Adivasi Sangthan 94
kisan (peasant) movement 172
Kochanek, Stanley 10
Koshala Ekta Manch 238
Koshala Party 238
Koshala Raj, demand for 238–41
Kothari, Rita 20
Kui-Lipi/Kui scripts 243
Kunzru, H. N. 10, 148
Language Agitation 212, 220
language-based communalism 35
language-based identities 190–91
language nationalism: and
anticolonial
nationalism 190–91;
competing imaginations of
communities200–2; constraints
of 191–92; Kannada, English,
Sanskrit and other Indian
languages
197–200; and Kannada
identity 191; opposition to state
reorganisation on linguistic
basis in Princely Mysore 197;
and politics of space and equal
rights 205–6; of princely state
and presidency regions 196–97;
relation between Kannada
nationalism
nationalism
192–96
and Indian
language politics, communalisation
of 42
license-raj system 16
Lingayat community 197, 200–2
linguistic communalism 9, 51, 77,
281, 283
linguistic communities 51, 77, 277,
279
linguistic–cultural minorities 12, 42
linguistic demarcation of provinces,
principle of 37
linguistic minorities 20, 33, 42, 56, 58,
130, 234–38, 289, 294, 297–98
linguistic principle, for reorganisation
of provinces 254–58
Linguistic Provinces Commission see
Dar Commission
linguistic reconstruction programmes
(USSR) 39
linguistic reorganisation, of provinces
4, 8
linguistic states, demand for creation
of 33–40
Lushai Hills, annexation of 50
Lyngdoh, B. B. 267
Madhya Bharat 70, 72, 79, 252
Madhya Pradesh: claims and
counterclaims for creation of
79–80; classification as Part ‘A’
state 80; Congress Party and
politics of integration in 82–84;
demands for division of 101;
factionalism within two-party
competitive system 87–93;
factors
responsible for slow and
partial integration of 73; gulabi
channa relief money scandal 92;
political competition in 1990s
and division of 93–99; politics
of factionalism 84–87; Reorgan-
isation Bill 98
Madras Presidency 3, 170, 172,
196, 203
Mahakoshal 17, 72, 78–79, 82–85,
88, 90
Mahakoshal Pradeshik Congress
Committee 79
Maharashtra: claim for regional
identity 152–55; concept of
identity
144; cultural traditions and
identity 145; electoral politics in
149–52; history of 145–49; issues
of Vidarbha and Marathwada
158–59; Maratha empire 146;
politics of Dalits 157–58; role of
Marathas 155–57; sons-of-the-
soil movement 152
Maharashtra Government
Administrative
Reforms Committee
Report (2002) 162
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS)
21, 154
Mahar movement 78
Maha Vidarbha movement 58,
77–78
Malkani, Narayandas 137
Manipur 261–62, 264–65, 268, 270,
275, 278, 292
Manipur Hill Areas Act 268
Manor, James 34
Maratha empire 146
Marathi Sahitya Parishad 148
Marathwada 17, 144–45, 149, 151,
155, 158–59
Marmik 154
Mawdsley, Emma 14, 112–13, 118
Medhi, Bishnu Ram 287
Meghalaya 268, 292
Menon, V. P. 74
military dimension of society 63
Miller Committee 197
Misra, Godavaris 216
Mitra, Subrata 71
Mizoram 268, 275, 292
Modern Indian Language (MIL) 295
Mohanty, Gopinath 220
Montagu–Chelmsford Report (1918)
52, 54, 254, 283; reforms 4
Moplah revolt (1921) 54
mother tongue education, in schools
35
Motilal Nehru Committee 7, 276
Motilal Nehru Report (1928) 6, 255
multilingual education 41
multilingual states, linguistic
integration
in 296–98
Munda, Jaipal Singh 122, 222, 225
Muslim immigrants 56
Muslim League 61
Naga Hills District 262, 269–70
Nagaland 11, 268, 270–71, 275,
277–79, 292
Naga National Council 262, 269
Naga Peoples’ Convention 270
Nagpur Pact (1953) 78, 149
Naidu, Chandrababu 175
national coalition government
111–12
national cultural renaissance project
5 non-cooperation movement 54, 193
National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
97
National Democratic Front of
Bodoland 273
nationalism: concept of 199; models
of development of 165
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)
21, 99, 151
nationality: definition of 168;
linguistic
principle of 53
national language 9, 32, 40–41, 55,
137, 219
national movement 3, 71, 78, 83; and
development of capitalism 168;
and Indian National Congress
(INC) 4; Lingayat community,
participation of 200–2; and
linguistic
nationalities 169; and
signs of reorganisation 4–7
‘national park’ policy 263
natural resources, sharing of 59
Naxalites 95, 160
Needs for Checks and Balances: Articles
on Linguistic States (Ambedkar) 9
Nehru, Jawaharlal 213, 249–50, 255–
58, 267, 286; autobiography 32;
contribution to state-formation
processes 34, 44–45; cultural
and educational policy 32–33;
dilemma over demand for
linguistic
states 34–40; early
education31; Glimpses of World
History 35; involvement in
languagepolitics 32; model of
democratic consensus 17–18;
morality and ethical politics 33;
16-point Agreement with Naga
Peoples Convention leaders 271;
speeches during years of 1949–
1964 36; views on Hindi–Urdu
conflict 31, 36; vision of new
independent India 7, 19
Nehru, Motilal 31
North-Eastern Areas Reorganisation
Act (1971) 57, 268
North Eastern Council Act 268
North East Frontier Agency (NEFA)
261–62, 264–65, 269, 288, 290,
292
North East Frontier (Administration)
Supplementary Regulation 268
North-East Reorganisation Act
(1972) 23, 294
Northwestern Provinces 50, 77
O’Donnell Committee (1932) 223–24,
229, 233
Official Language Amendment Bill
(1965) 41
Official Language Bill 41
Official Language Commission
(1956) 42, 44
Official Languages Act (1963) 56
Orissa: adivasi concentrations 241–44;
Koshala Raj 238–41; Legislative
Assembly 230; official language
242
Orissa Sahitya Akademy 237
Orissa Sanskriti Samaj 238
Oriya movement 22, 241; and
amalgamationof Oriya-speaking
people 221–28; despair and
violence over SRC
recommendations
230–33; discontent over
SRC report 228–30; Language
Agitation 212, 220; language
and literature, interest and
conflict
219–20; outline of 211–13;
Seraikella and Kharswan 217–19;
signature campaign 225; States
Reorganisation Commission
and 213–33; for unification of all
Oriya-speaking territories 213
Other Backward Castes (OBC) 82,
109, 153, 295; politics of caste-
based empowerment of 119
Paippaladin Samhita 235
Pai, Sudha 20, 69
Palshikar, Suhas 152, 154, 162
Panchayati Raj 61
Panchayat Samiti 151
Pandian, M. S. S. 205
Panikkar, K. M. 9–10, 148
partition of Bengal 6, 51, 254
Pataskar Commission (1966) 268,
291
Patel, Sardar 74, 100, 148, 257, 262
Pawar, Sharad 21, 150–51, 153, 156
peasant movement 52, 172
peasant mutinies (1845–1875) 50
Perso-Arabic script 129, 131, 137–38,
140
Phukan, Nilmoni 290
Plains Tribal Council of Assam
(PTCA) 272, 293–94
political entrepreneurs 120–22
political reunification 195–96
Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan,
Cuttack 215
praja mandals 75, 81, 100
praja (tenant) movements 61
Praja Socialist Party (PSP) 85
The Prajatantra 220
Prasad, Rajendra 6, 52, 216
Pratap, Bhai 132
Presidency of Fort William 50
Princely Mysore 191–92, 195–97,
200–3, 205; opposition to state
reorganisation on linguistic
basis in 197
princely state, integration into Indian
Union 52, 76
print capitalism 166–67, 177, 190,
199
Provincial Congress Committees 6,
19, 185, 222, 224, 230
public education system 178
Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) 175
Punjabi language 39
Rabha Hasong (Rabhaland) 296
Rabha movement 296
Rajagopalachari, C. 54
Ram Mandir campaign 118
Rao, Chandrashekhar 18
Rao, Narasimha 118–19
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
14, 78, 117, 121–22
Ratha Yatra of Lord Jagannath 236
reasoned morality 33
regional autonomy movements 169
regional languages, growth of 56
religion-based nationalism 190
Renkin, W. O. 244
reorganisation of states: on basis of
culture and identity 22–23; on
basis of languages and States
20–22; concerns related to 19–20;
conflicts associated with 62;
Constitutional Amendment Bill
for 60; in East and North-East
22–23; ethics associated with
63; for Hindi heartland 20; in
historical and political context
19–20; linguistic principle for
254–58; nationalist movement
and 4–7; Nehruvian vision of
7; specificity and significance
of 18–23; States Reorganisation
Commission (SRC) and 7–12;
in Western and Southern India
20–22
Republican Left Democratic Samiti
158
Riddles of Hinduism (Ambedkar) 155
Risley, Herbert 6, 254
River Boards Act 59
Roman script for Bodo language
movement 294
Rural Debt Amortisation Law 90
rural–urban migrants 57
Samajwadi Party 118, 158
Sambalpur Hitaishini 239
Sambhaji Brigade 161
Samna 154
Samyukta Maharashtra 78, 147–48
Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad
148
Samyukta Maharashtra Sabha 147
Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti 21,
149
Sangma, Williamson A. 267, 288
Sanskrit language 31–33, 42, 131,
136, 141, 197–99, 203, 239
Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) 89
Sarangi, Asha 19
Saryupali Brahmins 116
Satpura Kisan Evam Mazdoor Kalyan
Samiti 94
satsangs (spiritual gatherings) 141
satyagraha 149, 232
Satyagraha Committee 232
Satyashodhak Samaj 157
Scheduled Languages 41, 56
Shetkari Sanghatana 151, 153
Shiv Sena 21, 145, 151, 157–58, 275;
anti-congress policy 154; claim
for regional identity 152–55;
Hindutva politics 153; sons-of-
the-soil movement 152; trade
union movement 154
Shiv Shakti 155
Shukla, Pandit Ravi Shankar 82, 84
silent revolution 109
Simon commission 271–72
Sindhi community: economic
success
130; evolution of Sindhi
language 133–37; and Hinduism
140; Islamic influences 141;
as linguistic minority 129;
rehabilitation
of 132; scheduling
existence 133–37; script during
Mohenjodaro civilisation 137–42
Sindhu Resettlement Corporation
(SRC) 132
Singh, Arjun 92–93, 114, 116
Singhbhum District Board 224
Singhbhum Utkala Sammilani 217
Singh, Digvijay 97
Sixth Schedule 61, 262, 267–68, 286,
288, 291, 297, 299
smaller states, demand for 12–18
social governance 62
social mobilisation 170
soldiers revolt (1857–1858) 54
sons-of-the-soil movement 152
Soren, Sonaram 226, 228
sovereignty, colonial model of 62
SRC report 44, 228, 234, 276;
implementation of 41; making of
250–54; as sacred text 258–68
Srikantia, B. M. 195–96, 198–99, 202,
204–5; English Geetagalu 202
Srikrishna Committee 18, 161
Srinivasulu, K. 21
state formation: Instrument of
Accession
75; and integration of
princely states 74–76; opposition
on linguistic basis in Mysore 197;
processes of 74–81; reconciliation
of territorial claims and
counterclaims
for 76–81; years of 41
state leaders and demands for
statehood
113–20
States Reorganisation Act (1956) 53,
55, 289
States Reorganisation Commission
(SRC) 55–56, 148, 172, 211,
245; creation of Hindi speaking
states 69; making of report
250–54; and Oriya movement
213–33; rationale of retaining
Assam as single state 287–89;
recommendations of 1, 8, 29;
for reconciling territorial claims
and counter-claims 76–81; and
reorganisation of states 7–12
Stuligross, David 111
Tamil Brahmins 203
Tamil Nadu 61, 63, 197; anti-Brahmin
movement 205; language riots
41–42; water disputes 58
Telangana 51, 57, 107, 164–65, 170,
177, 180, 279; cultural movement
181; dialect–language distinction
179; economic development
182; educated middle class 171;
Gentlemen’s Agreement 174;
rise of identity politics 179;
social and cultural scenario
171; Telegu Desam Party (TDP)
175–76
Telangana Praja Samithi (TPS) 174
Telegana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) 18,
175
Telegu Desam Party (TDP) 175
territorial administration 50
territory people 53
Tikekar, Aroon 155, 162
Tillin, Louis 20
Tisco 219, 222, 244
Tiwari, N. D. 118–19
trade union movement 154
trans-boundary waters: disputes in
sharing of 60; equitable
utilisation
of 59; integrated
management59; regulation and
development of 59; sustainable
development of 60
transnational governance 62
tribal ‘homelands’ 57
tribal minority language 296
Tripura 261–62, 264–65, 268, 275,
288, 292
Tura Conference 262
Udayachal 272, 294
United Progressive Allaince (UPA)
18
United Tribal Nationalist Front
(UTNLF) 273
Utkala Dibas 220
Utkal Association of Jamshedpur
235, 237
Utkal Congress Committee 222, 232
Utkal Kui Samaj 243
Utkal Sammilani 80, 213–14, 217–19,
223, 228, 230, 232, 237, 239–40
Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD) 117
Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee
(UPCC) 119
Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram 14
Venkatarao, Alur 192–96, 198, 202
Verghese, B. G. 19
vetti 170–71
Vidarbha 11, 21, 57–58, 144, 149, 155,
158–59
Vidyavardhaka Sangha 195
Vindhyachal 57, 76
Vindhya Union 76
Vishalandhra 178, 181; demand for
creation of 164, 171, 177
‘visual’ capitalism 178
Visuba Milana 220
vote banks 10
Wadhwani, T. T. 138
water resources, sharing of 59
West Bengal States Reorganisation
Committee 11
Western Orissa Development Council
241
Western Orissa Jana Jagaran Parishad
238
Western Orissa Liberation Front 238
Wilcox, Mayne 71
Yadav, Laloo Prasad 107, 120
Yadav, Mulayam Singh 116–20
zamindari system, abolition of 10
Zilla Parishad 151