Too late for caution

But keep a close eye on a new Telangana state

If the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government does indeed eventually decide to bifurcate the state of Andhra Pradesh, it could hardly be called a decision taken in haste. The Telangana movement has a history stretching back to the first years after Independence, but this latest crisis has been brewing since December 2009, when the UPA government announced that the "process of forming the state of Telangana will be initiated". When opposition to the move coalesced, the UPA retreated, and asked a committee headed by the venerable Justice Srikrishna to look at the alternatives. The Srikrishna committee duly submitted its report in 2010 - which was not particularly helpful as a guide to the future, since it basically listed all six possible combinations of Hyderabad, Rayalaseema, and coastal Andhra. The committee did, however, point out: "Most of the economic and developmental parameters show that Telangana (excluding Hyderabad city but including Hyderabad suburbs) is either on a par with or a shade lower than coastal Andhra." This does put a bit of a hole in the traditional argument of the Telangana movement that the region is the unfavoured stepchild of administrations in Hyderabad.

The worry, though, is that granting statehood on a case-by-case basis, especially when there is no compelling socio-economic case for bifurcation, will merely incentivise disruptive and irrational protests across the country. Ideally, the government should have looked at a larger canvas, in which several cases for the division of larger states were considered impartially. In any case, of late the argument has begun to rage as to whether smaller states are in any case as helpful as it was earlier thought they would be. The experience of the last large-scale state creation process under the National Democratic Alliance government, which gave birth to Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, has not been uniformly positive. Indeed, Jharkhand has been a bit of a disaster, riddled with corruption and political instability; Chhattisgarh has become the focal point for the Left-wing extremism; and Uttarakhand's lack of ability to implement regulations led to calamitous consequences recently in Kedarnath. This does not augur well for a separate Telangana - especially since the regionalist movement has a long history of association with Left-wing extremism, a tendency that has not completely died out. On the other hand, it is possible that this argument gets things backward, since the sample of new, smaller states should include the rumps of the old ones: after all, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh prospered after they were bifurcated.

In any case, by all accounts, it is too late to warn against the problems of a separate Telangana. Whether or not the Congress party, which needs to win Andhra Pradesh to have a chance of returning to power in 2014, will benefit electorally from the bifurcation is unknown. But the possible consequences of bifurcation will likely be a continuing concern for whoever is in power in New Delhi for the coming years. Caution can no longer be advised, but watchfulness should be. India cannot afford another state, especially one containing a magnet-like city, to suffer Left-wing extremism or endemic political instability.