[This is an excerpt from Gautam R Desiraju and Deekhit Bhattacharya’s book “Delimitation and States Reorganization: For A Better Democracy in Bharat” with permission from Ink, the book’s publisher.]
At both national and state levels, economic growth is closely related to the number of “second cities”, that is, where there is a prevalence of cities which have at least a third of the population of the biggest set of cities in a region. A departure from this rule results in long-term political instability driven by regional grievances and conflicts, mostly driven by stunted growth beyond the big cities.
We have seen countries such as Thailand and Chile, which have lost decades many times over due to the concentration of political and economic power in singular centres. One must note that between 1985 and 2015, an era when the economic chasm between China and India reached stratospheric heights, China developed nineteen second cities, while India could manage just two, Malappuram and Kollam.
Even this is misleading since these satellite cities arose only due to a redrawing of administrative maps. A large reason why this disparity came into being was because of capital-centric state administration and interests that neglected the state beyond its capital’s suburbs; each state capital has developed an ivory tower replica of what was once Lutyens’s Delhi.
Beyond the limits where media attention dries up, state presence evaporates. This was both a factor as well as a symptom of a political system which has failed to deliver robust and equitable economic growth in India and is in urgent need of correction.
Likewise, the current model of “One Language One State”, which for the sake of convenience may be called the Nehru-Prakasam model, has critical cultural drawbacks. The first, which is actually a reality, is that the larger a state, the more is the diversity contained within it.
Bharat being as diverse as it is, castes, languages, dialects, faiths, and other such identity markers increase rapidly with state size. The minority population, especially Muslims, can become sizable in larger states. Inevitably, this leads to long-term conflict. The inclusion of minorities, whether by caste, linguistic, religious, or any other facet of identity with a large enough dominant population, causes politics to devolve into a race between smaller identity groupings to ally with or against the dominant grouping to capture power.
This underlying social fragmentation is the principal driver behind clientelist politics. Identity groups compete to capture state resources and then use the same to dispense favours to themselves. Naturally, this leads to bad economic outcomes for all as the economic discourse shifts from public infrastructure, governance, and services to aggrandizement of one’s own identity grouping by emptying the state’s coffers.
This was perhaps why the British maintained large provinces; the higher the social fragmentation in a place, the less was the access to public goods. Not much has changed today. These very debilitating factors also suit the electoral calculations of the political parties today because these parties have emerged as a product of this very same semi-feudal and extractive system.
Thus, the Congress did not further divide Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, going against specific recommendations of the 1956 SRC Report.
Similarly, the only way for identities to survive, negotiate, and ultimately capture power in the state depends on their numbers within a state – the larger the state, the more the pressure for similar groups to give up their cultural differences and present a united front. This, unfortunately, leads to a loss of cultural diversity over time.
As we saw above, the Tamils lost a lot of their unique linguistic and cultural differences owing to the drive to ‘standardize’ what it meant to be Tamil. Large states, thus, cause an artificial homogenization – differences within distinct groupings in a state are erased so that dissimilarities between states may be accentuated.
Cultural nuances and gradations are smothered by the singular blanket of linguistic uniformity. And regions with markedly different identities (Garhwal and Kumaon, Jammu and Kashmir, Rayalaseema and Andhra) are disturbingly homogenized. The diversities within a state are, therefore, suppressed while differences between states are exacerbated for purely political reasons. Politics ceases to represent diversity but becomes a tool of social engineering to infuse pathological mutations in the social, political, and economic make-up of the country.
This leads to divisive politics marked by clientelism, casteism, and secessionist subnationalism. The rise of social media, instant communication, and digital public infrastructure has rattled political outfits which are identitarian. This is because the economic bedrock of identitarian politics in linguistic states is clientelism, as described above.
One cannot dispense too many exclusive benefits to their identity grouping (usually particular castes) if benefits are linked to universal identification like Aadhaar, or delivered straight to their bank accounts without conveniently placed middlemen diverting flows. Likewise, with grievances having the potential to become national from local overnight thanks to social media, the systematic neglect of regions which would otherwise be electorally manageable is a difficult task.
These changes to India’s political economy, infused by technology, makes certain kinds of technological solutions natural targets of the political losers in this scenario; unsurprisingly, reforms which would be gladly welcomed on grounds of increased efficiency and citizen access are challenged in courts and made subject to disinformation campaigns.
Thus, the kind of identitarianism wrought by having linguistic states in their present shape is fundamentally opposed to citizen-centric reform, particularly those leveraging technology.
Authors’ Profile:
Gautam R Desiraju is one of the foremost scientists in India with an H-index of 104 with seminal contributions to the fields of crystal engineering and hydrogen bonding. He is Professor Emeritus at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and Distinguished Professor at UPES, Dehradun. He was the president of International Union of Crystallography between 2011 and 2014. Desiraju is a recipient of several international awards, such as the Humboldt Research Award and van der Waals Prize. He is the author of Bhārat: India 2.0, which advocates constitutional reform in India to bring it more in tune with its civilizational nature.
Deekhit Bhattacharya is an Associate at Luthra and Luthra Law Offices India, Delhi. He has economics and law degrees from the University of Delhi. His interests and publications focus on the interface between state, society, business, and technology. He was associated with the S20 Secretariat of the G20 at the Indian Institute of Science with Prof. Desiraju.
