SOROOR AHMED analyses the past as well as ongoing moves to carve out smaller States in Hindi and Non-Hindi States.
While the demand for Telangana evoked sharp polarisation leading to the mass resignation by elected representatives, suicides and violent protests forcing the Centre to change its stand a fortnight ago, no such resistance was witnessed when landlocked Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh were being pieced. Though the then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad initially made a famous Jharkhand-over-my-dead-body speech, his wife Rabri Devi’s government succumbed to the pressure of Congress, BJP and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha a few years later. The Congress made it a condition to support her government after it failed to secure majority in the assembly election of February 2000.
The absence of opposition was attributed to the lack of public sentiment against partition in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Today Lalu is one of the votaries of smaller states; so is the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and former Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan. Though former UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav may be opposing the demand of trifurcation of his state made by Chief Minister Mayawati, in the past he too did not oppose the creation of Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand).
The creation of Chhattisgarh was not opposed as both the major political parties of Madhya Pradesh, the Congress and the BJP, were for it and there is no third political force in that region as in Bihar and UP.
While the demand for Telangana has split all the major political parties in Andhra Pradesh – as Sutlej Water dispute often divides all the parties in Punjab and Haryana – there is no such fissures within the political parties in the Hindi-heartland states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Sensing similar polarisation in his home state, West Bengal, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee almost stonewalled any further demand for new states.
Had the politicians as well as people of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reacted in a similar way, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand) might not have become a reality in November 2000. It is not that only these landlocked Hindi states are big in size. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are equally large or much larger. Rajasthan is the only Hindi-speaking state where there is apparently no strong demand for the bifurcation or trifurcation of the state. Perhaps this may be because a large part of it is too sparsely populated.
While politicians of UP and Bihar spoke about the need for the creation of smaller states, no such demand came from their counterparts in Maharashtra, the state whose name itself suggests that it is too big an entity. If the logic of better governance is argued in favour of smaller states – though it has not always proved correct – then Maharashtra should be the first state to be partitioned in at least two or three parts. Economically, socially and culturally, the landlocked region of Vidharba is totally different from the coastal western Maharashtra. Yet any such demand for separate state is bound to evoke sharp reactions from the uncle-nephew duo of Thackerays – Bal and Raj.
As language was one of the important bases for the creation of a number of new states after the recommendations of the first States’ Reorganisation Commission in mid-1950s, further division of Andhra Pradesh, and even West Bengal, is bound to elicit sharp reaction. On the other hand the people of much larger Hindi-speaking belt do not fear losing their language and cultural identity so easily if their respective states are bifurcated; therefore, the sense of sub-nationalism is not so strong among them.
But one thing is clear; be it Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Telangana, or possibly Gorkhaland in any distant future, all are landlocked regions which, despite being rich, have a sizeable number of people with strong sense of alienation. That is what the politicians try to cash in on.
What is strange is that the failure of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, which turned into the Maoists’ stronghold, did not deter the people of Telangana and even Gorkhaland to make similar demand for smaller states. Both Telangana and Gorkhaland have a history of ultra-Left violence. While the former witnessed the first Communist insurrection just a few months after independence, the Naxalbari sub-division of Gorkhaland exploded in the late 1960s to give a new word to the Indian politics, Naxalism. Even today Telangana at least is not free from the Red influence.