Mayawati plan to split UP: Cut it!

When the Dalit czarina Mayawati announced her plan to split Uttar Pradesh into four states, all political parties were stumped. Even as they quickly dubbed it as a pre-election gimmick, they were fully aware that they could not afford to simply shrug it off.

So, there came several riders with the criticism. The Congress accepted the idea of smaller states, but qualified it with an argument that such decisions could not be knee jerk pre-election proposals — they have to be arrived at with due consideration, preferably through a Second States Reorganisation Commission. The BJP has always claimed that it is a votary of smaller states, but it could not agree with the BSP supremo about the timing.

Mayawati’s master stroke came at a time when the Congress, and the broader UPA leadership, is struggling to find a way out of the Telangana imbroglio. The simmering demand of a separate state to be carved out from Andhra Pradesh is a legacy of the first States Reorganisation Commission, and the decades-long pendency of the issue only highlights the problems in redrawing the state boundaries.

There are several other examples, including the inability to decide the future of Chandigarh that has been pending since the 60s, when Punjab and Haryana were separated.

The undeniable political reality is that the division of the country along linguistic lines has not yielded the ideal federal polity. There are regional imbalances, and there is unevenness in growth. There are unfulfilled regional aspirations.

There are islands of prosperity and vast tracts of poverty. That Uttar Pradesh, with a population of more than 16 crore, would be the fifth populous most country in the world if it were an independent is indeed, reason enough to go for a four-way divide.

The same holds true for other big states such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and even Madhya Pradesh and Bihar that have been sub-divided just a decade ago. All these states are bigger than several independent countries, and thus have huge administrative problems. The logic of one language-one state is past its expiry date.

In the 50s, when Andhra Pradesh was constituted as a state for the Telugu speaking people, its population was 3 crore, and now as the people clamour for Telangana, the aggregate Telugu speaking population is 6 crore.

In the case of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, there is very loaded anecdotal evidence that is harnessed by both sides to plead their case. There is an oft-quoted statement attributed to Pandit Nehru: “Ek masoom bholi bhali ladki ki ek natkhat ladke ke saath shaadi ki jaa raha hai, chahe toh woh milke reh sakte hai ya bichad sakte hai (an innocent girl is marrying a naughty boy. If they wish to, they can stay together; or they could separate.)”. Now the protagonists of Telangana invoke this statement in favour of their cause, whereas the pro-Andhra side argues that the formation of a state is not a marriage that can be annulled.

But there is more to the demand of separate statehood for Telangana. In 2004, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and the Congress were electoral allies, and there was a commitment for a separate state. The same promise was repeated in 2009, but the issue hangs in a limbo.

The proponents of a unified Andhra Pradesh shoot down this enhanced population logic, by arguing that if this were to be accepted, the process of sub-dividing states would be unending.

However, there is an unassailable fact. The geography of the states is actually dictated by the politics of the nation. When the recommendations of the first SRC were implemented by Nehru’s government, politics played a part in redrawing the state boundaries. That is how a state called Madhya Pradesh a landmass virtually unclaimed by any other state in the central part of India, with all the unwanted and leftover regions from the seven neighbouring states — Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat — came into being. There was no linguistic unity, nor any geographical continuity, but the state that came into being was the biggest in terms of the area, so much so that just one district Bastar was bigger than the entire state of Kerala.

The second time three new states were created — Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh — it was the politics of the BJP at play. Prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was technically implementing a pre-election promise, but the guiding principle was politics.

It is the primacy of politics over everything else that makes the argument of administrative ease almost redundant when this issue is discussed. Besides, the jury is still not yet out on the principle of small is beautiful when it comes to states. The ease in administration benefit is at times outweighed by the instability factor, as the experience in Jharkhand shows that there have been four chief ministers in the last 11 years and no one has completed a full five year term.

Now in the immediate future, Mayawati’s brilliant looking move, may or may not get her any traction in defeating the anti-incumbency, and there may not be any measurable impact on the outcome of the 2012 assembly elections. But the issue of smaller states, and the need for a second SRC is not likely to die down easily.

There would be a greater sense of urgency for the setting-up of a second SRC even within the UPA-2, if the UP results show that there is a regional divide in favour of various political outfits. If the politicians come to a general understanding that grabbing the entire state of UP is becoming an increasingly difficult task, then they would surely split it. The advantage would be that they would then share the spoils of power in four states. There would be four chief ministers, and for the bureaucrats, the permanent rulers of the country, there would be four chief secretaries to grab. After all the Arjun Mundas, Raman Singhs, Khanduris and Jogis of their respective lands could not have even dreamt of becoming chief ministers in their undivided states.

The Centre may have sent back her proposal for creating four states, but sooner rather than later, when the state is indeed divided, Mayawati would be remembered as the one who first mooted the idea seriously, and got a resolution passed in the state assembly.

Till then, there would be enough scope to exercise all the lung power over the complex issues that are woven into such redrawing of boundaries.