REMAPPING INDIA
New States and their Political Origins
Louise Tillin
Oxford University Press
268 pages; Rs 850
Do we need more states? The division of Andhra Pradesh has become a reality. And the verdict of the people on the division is also out. The party that was seen to be behind the division of the state, the Congress, has been routed on both sides in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. The Congress' electoral fortunes show that either the logic of the division was flawed or if there was, indeed, some solid reason for the split, it was not properly communicated to the people.
A closer look at the history of the demand for a separate state of Telangana suggests that the movement that started in the 1960s and 1970s gained momentum after the state made rapid progress in the subsequent decades. That progress - not the region's relative backwardness - is seen as the catalyst that fuelled the demand for a separate state. One of the possible reasons would have been the relative marginalisation of political leaders of the Telangana region. However, no one knows better than the voters of Andhra Pradesh that having a chief minister from a particular region does not ensure the overall development of that area. Otherwise, how does one explain the relative backwardness of Rayalaseema even though leaders from this region occupied the chief minister's chair for 28 long years?
Anyway, the division of Andhra Pradesh is a closed chapter now - and so is the carving out of Jharkhand from Bihar, Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh. The context of redrawing state boundaries and the evolution of these new states are the subjects of the book under review. Most of what has been argued in the book was argued elsewhere when the country hotly debated the division of Andhra Pradesh. Louise Tillin writes, for example, that redrawing state boundaries may not automatically lead to faster development, as has been shown by the wide divergence in the rates of growth in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand. This argument has been made a number of times. Again, the fact that the creation of smaller states does not necessarily mean administrative efficiency or political stability is something we already know.
The issues that require deeper examination have earned only a passing reference in the book. For instance, do we need more states? Or why has Jharkhand suffered long spells of political instability? All the book says about political disorder in Jharkhand is that "there is a strong impression that weakly organised political parties offer limited mobility for aspiring candidates, even as the promise to extract rents from mining and industrial ventures increases the lure of political careers". Sure, but isn't that true for other states as well?
On the need for smaller states, the author's concluding remarks are: "The idea that creating more states is a simple panacea for reducing regional inequality is misleading… The longer-term histories of regional political regimes and political economies remain important in shaping the conditions for economic growth and poverty reduction." What the author is probably hinting at is that redrawing state boundaries must follow some logic and should not be occasioned by short-term political gains.
One sweeping comment aside, the book does not offer a credible answer to the question of whether we need more states. Does a state like Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of nearly 200 million, need to be divided into smaller units for better administrative efficiency? A table in the book offers some insight: an average federal sub-unit caters to a population of 0.3 million in Switzerland, 5.15 million in Germany, 6.05 million in the United States and 7.15 million in Brazil. In India, on the other hand, an average federal sub-unit has a population base of 37.7 million.
The comparative data show that we need many more states or federal sub-units to improve governance. The question, then, is, how do we redraw state boundaries? Language was used as one of the criteria to do so in the 1950s. Popular movements were offered as one of the reasons for the creation of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Telangana. Should we not evolve a composite set of criteria to carve out new states to improve administrative efficiency?
The chapters on political changes in the states that were eventually divided and at the Centre make for interesting reading. The author argues that the demand for new states gained momentum following the decline of the Congress and the beginning of the end of political dominance of upper castes in the Hindi heartland. "It was the changing logic of state politics in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the 1980s and 1990s that ensured it was from these states - and not elsewhere - that new states were created in 2000," the author argues.
On the whole, the book under review is, at best, an excellent doctoral thesis that details - without offering fresh insights - the set of circumstances that led to the creation of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh.
