An idea for India: Keep it small to hold it together

I remember a conversation between economist KN Raj and a Swedish visiting fellow. The latter described, enthusiastically, a project in development. He claimed that its coverage was nationwide. Raj listened quietly and said, “In India, that would be a pilot plant.”

The idea of India demands bigness. The idea of large scale, size and number has fascinated our nation. We are proud of being the biggest democracy, a populous nation, and even announced that the world’s biggest industrial disaster took place in Bhopal. Bigness and number seem to be our tickets to history.

Even when it comes to the nation state, our emphasis is on unity and integrity, rather than on unity and diversity. We love behemoths and juggernauts. Even our statist narratives are about how India was put together and how our Bismarck, Sardar Patel, kept more than 500 principalities together, of how he forced the Nizam of Hyderabad to accede to India.
The cottage industry and the Gandhian project were too modest to be anything but footnotes in our march to history.

There have been counter-trends, which are getting bigger. Tacitly, Indians have often preferred scale. Small states arose as an answer to big states. Small, many felt was sensitive, decentralised and responsive. Many of these groups sought secession rather than decentralisation.

But in the first few decades, small went formally underground as we sought steel frames of bureaucracy and national plan as wagers for the future. The idea of linguistic states frightened the middle-class, giving them visions of anarchy and disorder.

Things changed after the emergency. The Congress as a steel frame began losing out to the regional parties. Secondly, planning and development became forms of neglect and the neglected areas became beehives of agitation. Their strategy, unlike that of frontier groups, was not secession but autonomy.

The problem became more acute as the linguistic became a politics of ethnic demand. Khalistan was one example. Gorkhaland was another. Telangana was a persistent battle till last week. Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand added to the list of possibilities. As these states become formalised, they become a banal part of our imaginations. It is smallness as metaphor, as a vehicle for difference, as an India of diversity that frightens us.

Modernisers dote on the large scale; monoculture, the bigness of corporate mergers and acquisitions make us feel historically adequate. Smallness frightens us more than the tyranny of the emergency.

For a big section of the middle class, the emergency was a consolidation of scale, of the integrity of bigness fighting fifth columns. The idea of small states encourages this very corrosion; the threat is not from the communal and the capitalist, but from the ethnic.

At another level, this attitude appears strange. The small town is the consumerist hero evoking desire, while the small state is the political villain invoking disorder. The logic of anxiety and desire operates on different registers. Small in politics corrodes, while small in economics consolidates diversity.

Small in politics creates anxieties and oddly, the idea of small entities allows us to map anxieties openly. The idea of a disintegrating or unstable India is an India of small states, a reverse of the Sardar Patel effect. We treat the small as outside history or as belatedly historical like the subaltern. Small does not fit the logic of modernity and yet, one realises that small seeks the same kind of modernity. Small, in fact, is a form of distributive justice that the big seeks to centralise.

Part of the anxiety might lie in two separate fears. First is the myth of infinite regress and second, the myth of violence. Ethnic violence, both in India and abroad, is almost seen as mitosis, a politics of disorder as infinite division. Ethnic violence smacks of terror and between terror and disorder, we escalate many of the standard middle-class anxieties.
The idea of smallness of mind and the small state appear glued together. Gorkhaland, Bodoland and Vidarbha appear almost cancerous and divisive to the conventional political mind. Unity, we believe, needs fewer pieces.

Yet, when one watches the demand for smaller states, the logic appears reasonable. It is a claim to the identity, a demand for fairness, a plea for justice and efficiency. In the middle-class modernising mind, however, efficiency is a prelude to justice. Bigness, in fact, becomes a form of erectile envy. The real fear is that a great nuclear India will degenerate to a collection of village republics.

Yet, politics and its metaphors are changing. Federalism has become mechanical and the regions are looking for a new dynamic. Today, they search for justice, not in terms of individual mobility but in terms of collective groups. The small state fits the answer.

Also, the nature of metaphor changes as one gets tired of the old politics. There is a sense that splitting Uttar Pradesh into four states might be the ultimate de-centrist fantasy. It is the upper limit of the small state fantasy. I think it is an idea whose time is coming. Mayawati is ready. It might make for a more active Congress. It might redefine electoral politics in India, rescuing it from its staleness. When by its stalemate, small might be the only way out.

Also, the nature of metaphors, which channelises thought, is changing. Ecology and management, and even democracy, are creating a politics of the small different from the romanticism of the old kind. Maybe a united India of smaller states might be a happier prospect. A freedom from anxiety about the small may make democracy more inventive.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.