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Abstract
In India, the federal arrangement has remained central to democratic polity to deal with such a diverse, plural and vast size of territorial integrity. Its need was less of a choice than political imperative (Jalal, 1995: 161) to accommodate the dissent voices coming from different regions. As a reluctant federalist state (Saxena, 2012: 71), India has considered the idea of statehood majorly on two grounds. First was on the basis of ‘linguistic contiguity, economic efficiency, political unity and regional coherence’ (Sarangi and Pai, 2011: 10). The creation of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Bengal, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, etc. comes under this category. The second ground is ‘a sense of internal colonialism’ (Akhtar, 2003: 88) in which particular territorial part of the state feels marginalized and discriminated in economic development, and hence voices for new statehood. In this case, political actors cite under-development of the region despite being same linguistic and regional coherence, and socio-political dominance of the opposite regional group in the decision-making regarding public policy results in intra-state developmental disparities. Due to large territorial areas or population, these democratic demands also cite administrative inefficiency of the present state in order to develop the under-developed areas. Hence, they propose effective administrative efficiency for development in order to support the case of new statehood. The philosophy behind granting statehood to Chhattisgarh from Madya Pradesh, Jharkhand from Bihar, Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh and recently to Telangana from Andhra Pradesh was the case of economical backwardness. Each of these four states shared sense of injustice about their regional exploitation by the state of which they were previously a part (Mawdsley, 2010: 41). The statehood demand for Vidarbha, Marathwada, Gorkhaland, Bundelkhand, Purwanchal, Mithila, etc. can be put into this category.