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India has got its 29th state in a largely bloodless fashion. Telangana, the latest member of the resilient Indian Union of States, has met with a warm welcome by the Indian Centre with no less a person than the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, bestowing on it a notable measure of goodwill. More importantly, not many in India are frenetically crying ‘foul’ and calling for murderous violence against the creation of a new state. Anti-devolution opinion in Sri Lanka, please take note!
‘India gets a new state! We welcome Telangana as our 29th state. Telangana will add strength to our development journey in the coming years, Modi has reportedly said by way of welcoming Telangana. It needs to be carefully noted that the Indian Prime Minister is here speaking about development. The creation of a new linguistic state is seen as strengthening India’s development process. That is, increasing linguistic and cultural autonomy within the Indian Union is seen as a major ‘plus’ which would eventually contribute towards the national good.
The Telangana movement did not campaign for a separate sovereign country but, essentially, for another state within India, which would be autonomous in some respects but not enjoy independent, sovereign statehood. This has been the general trend in movements for state autonomy within India over the years. This is born of the realization that states are dependent on the centre for a viable and credible existence, while the centre views the creation of new states as contributing towards India’s development and multidimensional plurality, which latter helps define India as embodying the principle of unity in diversity.
It should be plain to see that diversity in the above sense has only contributed towards the country’s overall strength and vitality. The degree of autonomy provided to India’s vast diversity of ethnic and cultural groups has enabled most of them to operate within the Indian Union with their sense of self-respect firmly intact. This, in turn, has enabled many of them to give of their best to the Union. Thus, state autonomy and power devolution has only contributed towards India’s development; correctly understood.Today, many of India’s Southern states, including Tamil Nadu and Andra Pradesh , have transformed into high tech and educational hubs, for instance, and thereby contributed to India’s national interest in a major way.
Therefore, all in all, ‘nation-making’ has not contributed towards ‘nation-breaking’ in the Indian context. On the contrary, it has contributed strongly towards national unity and solidarity. These lessons are of obvious applicability to Sri Lanka, where even limited power devolution is viewed with alarm by many. But such nervousness over devolution on the part of Lankan ruling circles and their supporters would only aggravate the frustration of minority communities and prompt volatile sections among them to ‘maximize’ their demands in respect of political, economic and cultural autonomy. Thus, would national divisions aggravate dangerously. History has already taught Sri Lanka this lesson and the local body politic would be foolish to ignore it.
Sri Lanka is obviously too small a country to be restructured on the lines of a union of even one or two states enjoying a degree of
Uttaranchal, Chahattisgarh and Telangana are three states which have been carved out of others in India over the past 10 or 15 years with no destabilizing consequences for the Union. It is likely that in the years to come we will be witnessing more such divisions and subdivisions for the purpose of recognizing the cultural and linguistic autonomy, for instance, of India’s stupendously numerous nations, but the possibilities are that such boundary demarcations and re-demarcations would only strengthen India’s unity and geographical integrity instead of promoting its physical fragmentation.
Therefore, countries of South Asia would need to take a penetrating look at the Indian model and adopt elements from it for the effective functioning of their own, mainly, pluralistic states. Such adoptions could have the effect of contributing to the resilience and longevity of the latter.
The BJP enjoys a steamroller majority in the Lok Sabha and would in no way be dependent on its allies for running the Union but it would have no choice but to constantly keep in mind the ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of India and fashion its policies on the basis of this plurality of identities if it is to keep India stable. In India,political parties enjoying numerical majorities in legislatures, would be allowed to degenerate into ‘tyrannical majorities’ only by the most short-sighted and injudicious of central administrations. Central governments could forget India’s plurality only at the country’s peril.
For the purpose of maintaining domestic stability, India’s rulers would need to ensure the general contendedness of the majority of India’s communities and this requirement would prevent them from resorting in a major way to ethnic chauvinism in the governing process. India’s plurality, thus, becomes a check on racial chauvinism and other divisive tendencies on the part of central governments.
India’s diversity in terms of race, religion, language and other factors, could turn into a huge ‘plus’ in the crafting of foreign policy. There exists a close link between domestic and foreign policies and the diversity at home would invariably compel the country concerned to be increasingly internationalist in the foreign relations sphere. Thus, India would find itself progressively broad-basing its external relations and increasingly playing a major role in global affairs. Thus, will its standing as a major power be greatly enhanced.
However, economic inter-dependencies among countries are such, currently, that they are compelled to expand their external ties to the greatest extent possible. In this situation, it is states which are most internationalist in outlook that are bound to reap the most economic benefits and India could consider itself as one such major international presence.
