Book Review: Louise Tillin,Remapping India: New States and Their Political Origins

Remapping India is a deep and well-documented study of the carving out of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh from the three major Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, respectively, in 2000. It is a definitive study of the making of these three states and the politics of the parent states as they impinged on the rather long-drawn-out process of the decisions that led to them as well as the long histories behind them. The author also goes into the consequences of their status as separate states in federal India in terms of their democratic and developmental performance.

The complexity of the process of state formation in the multilevel federal India is underlined by the noncommittal predictive statement of the author writing so close to the advent of the new state of Telangana: ‘It remains to be seen whether federal coalition politics evolves in ways that promote the creation of Telangana’ (p. 192). The comment does underline the decisive role of the federal-level politics in creating a new state. Shorn of theoretical and methodological models in the literature bearing on this question (for which the reader is encouraged to look into the book), it would be enough here to briefly quote Tillin on what she herself has preferred to do:

Remapping India has offered a dynamic causal account which pays attention to relationships between levels of the federal system, and to the conjunction of political processes unfolding according to different yet often overlapping timetables, that influence each other while also retaining a degree of autonomy from each other. (p. 200)

Tillin begins with the popular explanations of the new state formations in 2000 in terms of popular movements at the mass level, electoral calculus, capitalist exploitation of natural resources and professed gain in governance at smaller scale. She develops and refines her own explanation that gives greater causal efficacy to first, the decline of Congress dominance; second, the decline of upper-caste dominance; and third, the rise of the Hindutva ideology and of the Bharatiya Janata Party in these three Hindi-speaking major states and in the coalition at the national level. Her decision to scale down the factor of popular movements is supported by the evidence that in none of the three cases did an active mass movement exist at the time of the decision to bifurcate the larger states. There was a considerable mass movement in Jharkhand, but in the distant past; in Uttarakhand again in the contiguous past; and none ever in Chhattisgarh. However, it is difficult to generalize from these three cases about a general theory of state formation. For the role of mass movements does appear to have a greater causal consequence in new state formations in the past, for example, Andhra Pradesh in 1953, in Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960, in the creation of the ‘Punjabi suba’ in 1966, and in tribal state formations in the northeast spread over the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, Tillin’s glossing over the factor of capitalist expansion may also beg questions, especially in cases of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, which are richly endowed with mineral resources. Separation of India’s richest mineral reserves from larger states with greater civil society mobilizational potential against narrow capitalist exploitation in the era of privatization and globalization of the Indian economy cannot be easily lost sight of.

The stability of the internal borders of India in the Hindi heartland was buttressed in the earlier post-independence decades by the Congress Party’s dominance at national and state levels, underpinned by the upper-caste dominance in the north (as elsewhere too with some variable trends in the south and west regarding the caste factor where non-Brahmin/middle castes rose to political and economic power earlier than in the north). As non-Congress parties and lower castes tended to rise in political power in the Hindi heartland, the fixity of interstate borders came to be questioned and created the need for the national- and state-level elite in the major national parties like the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party to rethink demands for new states, coming to terms with the new tendencies and trends in caste and party politics in the states and the nation. In Tillin’s argument, the decline of Congress and the upper-caste dominance were ‘necessary conditions’ for state creation in 2000 but not sufficient conditions. The sufficiency in causation came when the political leaders at the state and central levels were prompted to countenance the bifurcation of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Tillin presents a fascinatingly ‘thick description’, sparkling with analytical or explanatory factors, in all the three cases, with nuanced specificities and generalities at state and federal levels of politics in the three states prior to and at the time of state creation. She gives us an intriguing analysis of the change in the political thought of the BJP and the Congress in response to glacial changes in politics and society of the three concerned states, and the response of the national leadership to the new realities of politics. The account is rich in political sociology but glosses over political economy a bit.

All three state legislatures finally passed resolutions in support of the central bills for bifurcations after prior sanction by the president of India. Despite its eagerness to win state-level parties as allies in federal coalition politics, the BJP, at the head of the National Democratic Alliance government in New Delhi, was reluctant to move without such endorsing resolutions. The constitution requires the union government to refer the matter to state legislatures but does not give veto power to them. The BJP thus showed constitutional restraint, which the Congress Party at the head of the United Progressive Alliance government threw to the wind in pursuit of its partisan interests in 2013–2014 when it proceeded to create the new state of Telangana despite violent mass protests for and against in the Telangana region and the rest of the united state of Andhra Pradesh and in blatant rejection of the move by the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly. Such imperious misuse of the unilateral power of the parliament to create new states deserves to be democratically tamed and judicially restrained. For no other federal political system of the world allows the federal government to destroy the states the way it has happened in India. The Constituent Assembly incorporated Article 3, giving the parliament of India the exceptional power to redraw state boundaries for the obvious reason that internal boundaries in India were largely accidents of historical conquests and colonial administrative convenience. It was also dictated by the fact that the Constituent Assembly did not have time to deal with this knotty question in the turbulent aftermath of the partition of the country and the social, political and economic crises all around. There is an evident need to federalize the process of state formation in the Indian federation, an issue Tillin should have addressed.

There are a few errors in an otherwise excellent study that do not detract from its great merit but must be pointed out. The author omits the creation of the province of Bihar and Orissa in 1936 in British India (p. 29). While discussing the process of integration of princely states in independent India Tillin does not even mention Patel. She mistakenly gives the date of the 1936 provincial elections in British India as 1935. On page 104, she refers to the implementation of the policy of reservation of 27 per cent seats in education in the state of Uttar Pradesh by the Mulayam Singh Yadav government; however, that figure includes reservations in public employment as well. On page 118, she spells a category of Brahmins as ‘Saryupali’: it is really ‘Suryupareen’. On page 188, she misspells ‘Telangana Rashtriya Samithi’. On balance, Remapping India is a great read and arguably the best work on the creation of new states in 2000 in a comparative frame.

No competing text of the causes, processes and consequences of state formations in independent India comes anywhere close to this admirable and enviable study. Other reasonably good works—on Jharkhand by Amit Prakash and on Uttarakhand by Pradeep Kumar—are there, though a study of Chhattisgarh as a discrete case is still awaited. There are lessons here for the future as well. Tillin lists at least 12 pending demands for new states in India and presents a synoptic overview of two of these long-standing demands, namely, Telangana and Vidarbha. Of the two, the former actually was carved out as the latest, 29th state of India in 2013–2014.