Integrationist Tendencies and Regional Aspirations in Indian Federalism

Every federation contains a standing argument between the pull towards a single national centre and the pull towards the territorial communities that compose it. In India that argument is unusually visible, because the country was assembled out of provinces drawn by colonial convenience and princely states negotiated one by one, and because almost every region carries a language, a script and a political memory older than the Republic.

Integrationist tendencies and regional aspirations are the two halves of that argument — what regionalism is and why it recurs, what instruments the Union has used to absorb it, and what seventy-five years of record show about which instruments worked.

Region, Regionalism and the Vocabulary of Identity

The word “region” in ordinary usage denotes a stretch of territory. In politics it never means only that.

• A region is geographical space fused with a socio-cultural marker. Territory alone mobilises nobody; territory plus a shared language, religion, tribe, ethnicity or memory of deprivation mobilises a great deal.
• The marker varies by case, and the variation matters. Tamil regionalism was built almost entirely on language and a claimed Dravidian civilisational descent; North-East regionalism on tribe and ethnicity, with language secondary and often plural within one movement; Telangana regionalism on deprivation — jobs, water and government employment.
• Regionalism is a species of identity politics, sharing its grammar with caste and communal mobilisation: a boundary is drawn between an “us” with a legitimate claim and a “them” appropriating what belongs to us.
• Like every other -ism, it is a technique of mobilisation. People are organised around a marker in order to claim power — which makes the trajectory of a regional movement a function of the structure of power-sharing rather than of the depth of cultural feeling.
• This is why federalism sits opposite regionalism in the constitutional scheme. Secularism answered communalism; federalism answered regional aspiration, which is why the Indian model is a holding-together federation rather than a coming-together one.

Regionalism, sub-nationalism and secessionism as a continuum

These are best understood not as three different things but as three positions on one line, with movements sliding along it in both directions.

• Regionalism in its ordinary form claims a larger share of resources, recognition or administrative attention within the existing arrangement, and does not question the state’s territorial claim.
• Sub-nationalism arises when the regional community describes itself as a nation — with its own history, homeland and right to self-determination — while still inside the Indian state. The claim is now territorial and national, so it can in principle be pressed to separation.
• Secessionism is that claim carried to its conclusion, differing from sub-nationalism in degree rather than kind, which is why movements cross the line so quickly.
• The line runs in both directions, and that is the analytically important half. The Dravidian movement travelled from linguistic assertion to a demand for a separate Dravida Nadu and back to governing Tamil Nadu within the Union; Mizo nationalism travelled from armed secession to a state government led by the men who had fought for it.

	Regionalism	Sub-regionalism	Sub-nationalism	Secessionism
Unit asserting	A state or linguistic region	A region within a state	A self-described nation inside India	A nation claiming exit
Typical demand	Resources, recognition, autonomy	Statehood or a development board	Maximum autonomy, special status	Independence
Territorial integrity	Not challenged	Internal boundaries only	Potentially challenged	Directly challenged
Examples	Tamil Nadu, Punjab after 1966	Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Gorkhaland	Assam under the Assam movement, Kashmir	Khalistan, Naga sovereignty, ULFA
Standard response	Accommodation and bargaining	Statehood, councils or boards	Accord, package, asymmetric provision	Refusal, force, and later an accord

Gurharpal Singh’s core–periphery model

The most useful predictive device in the literature is Gurharpal Singh’s distinction between assertion from the core and from the periphery: aspirations rising in core regions are absorbable and have been absorbed, while movements on the periphery are the ones that have threatened the state.

• Border location is the first reason. A movement in Maharashtra has no frontier to retreat across; one in Nagaland, Mizoram, Kashmir or Punjab abuts an international boundary offering sanctuary, arms routes and rear bases.
• External sponsorship follows from location, since interested neighbours can reach peripheral movements and cannot easily reach core ones.
• Cultural distance is the third factor. Populations Tibeto-Burman in descent, Christian or Buddhist in faith, and administered as “excluded” frontier areas under colonial rule share fewer of the symbols that make the Indian nation intuitive.
• Weak economic integration is the fourth. The North-East is joined to the rest of India by a corridor a few tens of kilometres wide, and nearly all its boundary is international rather than domestic.

Positive and negative faces, and two further distinctions

• Iqbal Narain distinguished positive regionalism — assertion of a region’s identity and developmental interest as a legitimate claim inside a plural polity, which is the raw material of federalism — from negative regionalism, a politics of opposition marked by hostility to other regions and demands manufactured to embarrass a rival.
• Regionalism versus regionalisation. Regionalism is a sentiment and a mobilisation; regionalisation is a structural process — regional parties, regional media markets, regionally distinct party systems. India has had much regionalisation with little separatism, and the two must not be conflated.
• Regionalism versus sub-regionalism. Sub-regionalism is assertion directed not at Delhi but at a state capital: Vidarbha against Mumbai, Bundelkhand against Lucknow and Bhopal, Saurashtra against Gandhinagar. Its natural expression is a demand for a new state, and it is the dominant territorial politics today.

Rasheeduddin Khan’s typology and Sathyamurthy’s caution

• Rasheeduddin Khan classified Indian regionalism by the object of the demand: supra-state regionalism, where several states combine on a shared interest such as language or devolution; inter-state regionalism, where states contest a resource or boundary; and intra-state regionalism, the sub-regional demand against one’s own capital.
• T.V. Sathyamurthy insisted that regional movements be read against political economy rather than as free-standing cultural phenomena — as struggles by regionally located classes and dominant castes over a national developmental surplus.

Regional movements are not eruptions of feeling. They are claims on power, made in the idiom that is locally available.

The Forms Regional Assertion Has Taken

Type	Core demand	Principal cases	Characteristic response
Secessionist	Exit from the Union	Kashmir, Khalistan, Naga, Mizo, ULFA	Refusal, force, later an accord
Separate statehood	A new state inside the Union	Gorkhaland, Bodoland, Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Harit Pradesh, Saurashtra	Statehood, councils, or postponement
Greater autonomy	More powers for a state or region	Early Dravidian movement, Anandpur Sahib Resolution, North-East councils	Committees, packages, asymmetric provisions
Sons of the soil	Local preference in jobs and land	Shiv Sena, MNS, Assam movement, Mulki agitations	Domicile rules, local reservation
Linguistic and cultural	Protection or primacy of a language	Anti-Hindi agitations, Punjabi Suba, Marathi and Bengali movements	Eighth Schedule, language guarantees
Development deprivation	A share of resources and investment	Telangana, Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, special category demands	Boards, packages, occasionally statehood

• The secessionist category is small and specific: Kashmir from 1989, Khalistan in the 1980s, Naga nationalism from the 1950s, the Mizo National Front from 1966, and the United Liberation Front of Asom from 1979 — all on the periphery, which is the strongest support Gurharpal Singh’s model has.
• The state’s position here has never varied. Secession is refused outright; what varies is what follows the refusal, and the pattern is a demand defeated militarily and then partly accommodated politically, with the accommodation producing the durable outcome.
• Statehood demands are the most numerous and least dangerous. They accept the Union entirely and ask only for a redrawn internal line under Article 3 — Gorkhaland, Bodoland, Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Harit Pradesh, Saurashtra, and a Bhil Pradesh spanning four states’ tribal belts.
• Autonomy demands seek to change the terms rather than the map. The Dravidian movement, having abandoned Dravida Nadu, demanded maximum state autonomy through the Rajamannar Committee of 1969; the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 was an autonomy demand of the same kind; the North-East’s version has been for arrangements below statehood.
• Their timing is highly regular. Autonomy demands intensify when different parties hold power at the centre and in the state and subside when the same party holds both — strong evidence that much of autonomy politics is party politics in constitutional language.
• Nativist movements assert a prior entitlement of local populations to jobs, land and office: the Shiv Sena, founded in 1966 against South Indian clerical employees in Bombay; the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena against North Indian migrants in the 2000s; the Assam movement of 1979–85; and the Telangana Mulki agitations invoking the Nizam’s domicile rule. The category is distinctive because its target is a fellow citizen rather than the state, which makes it the hardest form of regionalism to defend.
• Language has been the most productive marker and the one the constitutional order absorbed best — the anti-Hindi agitations of 1937–40 and 1965, the Punjabi Suba movement, and the Samyukta Maharashtra and Mahagujarat agitations that split Bombay State in 1960.
• Its contemporary form is educational. The three-language formula in the National Education Policy 2020 has been rejected by Tamil Nadu, which released its own State Education Policy in August 2025 reaffirming Tamil and English, with central school-scheme funds withheld in the interim.
• Development-deprivation regionalism makes a comparative, quantitative claim — this region generates revenue, water, minerals or power and receives back less than its share. Telangana is the completed case; Vidarbha has a documented expenditure backlog acknowledged by Maharashtra’s own boards under Article 371(2); Bundelkhand‘s drought spans two states; and special category status demands press the same grievance on the fiscal system rather than the map.

Why Regionalism Recurs: The Explanatory Theories

No single theory covers the material. Each explains a different subset well, and the skill is matching theory to case.

Rudolph and Rudolph: modernisation does not dissolve identity

• Modernisation theory expected industrialisation, literacy and democratic politics to erode ascriptive identities and replace them with class and citizenship.
• Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph argued the opposite from Indian evidence: introducing democracy into a traditional society produces identity-based mobilisation, because democracy rewards whoever can assemble numbers, and the ready-made units for assembling numbers are caste, language, sect and region.
• Their phrase is the “modernity of tradition” — traditional identities are not obstacles modernity clears away but resources modernity puts to new uses.

Deprivation and prosperity: Juergensmeyer and Jannuzzi

• Mark Juergensmeyer’s culture of poverty argument holds that persistent deprivation generates not merely poverty but a mindset of hopelessness, dependency and powerlessness, transmitted across generations and hardening into collective identity.
• Thomas Jannuzzi’s culture of affluence is the mirror: prosperity generates materialism, individualism and stratification, and affluent regions develop identities aimed at protecting their prosperity from redistribution and from outsiders.
• The Khalistan movement in a Green Revolution Punjab is the case offered — a movement that grew not in India’s poorest region but its richest agricultural one, after two decades of rapid growth in farm incomes.
• The mechanism is a mismatch between economic weight and political return. A disproportionately productive region begins to feel it subsidises the rest and is repaid with interference over river waters, procurement prices and a capital it does not control.

Hardgrave and Weiner: disparity and nativism

• Robert Hardgrave’s uneven development thesis holds that where development is distributed unevenly and the disparity is significant and visible, the disadvantaged region generates regionalist movements — with Telangana against coastal Andhra and Vidarbha against western Maharashtra as the standard illustrations.
• Myron Weiner’s Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India is the foundational study of nativism, and it is frequently cited loosely.
• His argument is about labour markets, not sentiment. Where education has produced a locally rooted middle class, and migrants from outside hold a disproportionate share of the modern-sector jobs that class aspires to, nativist politics becomes both available and profitable.

Iqbal Narain: the politics of opposition

• Not every demand is socially rooted. Some are manufactured — raised by a party out of power, dropped when it returns to office, revived at the next convenient moment.

Sanjib Baruah: the asymmetry of age between identities

• Sanjib Baruah’s point is simple with large consequences: Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Assamese or Naga identities are centuries old, while the Indian identity in its modern political form is comparatively young.
• It follows that regionalism is the normal condition, not the aberration. What requires explanation is not why regional identities persist but why a national identity established itself as quickly as it did.
• His India Against Itself argues that Assamese sub-nationalism was itself a modern construction, built through language, print and a homeland claim in the colonial period, and that it then generated internal minorities — Bodos, Karbis, Misings — who repeated against Assam the logic Assam had used against Delhi.
• This recursive quality is the book’s most useful idea. Every successful territorial identity creates a smaller one inside itself with an identical case, which is why the Assam settlement produced Bodo demands and why there is no natural stopping point to ethnic territoriality.

Paul Brass: instrumentalism and permanence

• Paul Brass offers two propositions usually run together. The first is that nationalism is the short-term trend in Indian politics and regionalism the permanent feature: given the country’s scale, regional politics is the default and national consolidation the episodic achievement.
• The second is his instrumentalist account. Against primordialists, who treat ethnic identity as an ancient given that erupts when constraints weaken, Brass argues identities are constructed and reconstructed by elites competing for power, who select from available cultural markers the one that best serves the coalition they need.
• Brass also derived four features of the Indian state’s approach, and they describe the record accurately: secessionist demands are rejected outright; demands framed in religious terms are resisted while the same demands framed linguistically or developmentally are accommodated; the state responds only when a demand acquires broad support; and the views of other affected groups are weighed before any accommodation.

Prerna Singh: subnationalism as a developmental asset

• Prerna Singh’s How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India is the strongest argument that regionalism can be productive rather than merely tolerable.
• The finding. States where a cohesive subnational solidarity was forged — Tamil Nadu and Kerala above all — have delivered markedly better literacy, infant mortality, public health and schooling outcomes than states where no comparable identity formed, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
• The causal mechanism is the point, not the correlation. Shared subnational identity generates solidarity across class and caste lines; solidarity makes elites willing to fund public goods benefiting people unlike themselves; and it makes citizens demand those goods as members of a common community rather than as clients of a patron.

The strongest evidence in the Indian record is not that regionalism can be survived, but that in some states it is why the government works.

Atul Kohli: the inverted-U curve and the democratic answer

• Atul Kohli’s empirical claim is that Indian ethnic and regional movements follow an inverted-U curve: the movement arises, gathers strength, peaks and subsides.
• The height of the curve is set by two variables — the genuine public support the movement commands and the external backing it receives.
• His larger argument matters more. Democracy is itself a cause of ethnic mobilisation, because competitive politics rewards group organisation; but only democracy contains it, because only democracy can give the mobilised group a share of power without a war. The prescription follows: more democracy, not less — power-sharing, devolution, and institutions co-opting movement leaderships into decision-making.

Varshney, the external dimension, and Harrison’s falsified pessimism

• Ashutosh Varshney identifies three competing master narratives of Indian nationhood: a secular-territorial conception in which anyone within the territory is equally Indian; a Hindu nationalist conception organised around a civilisational core; and a plural conception treating India as a federation of communities. The plural narrative treats regional identity as constitutive, the secular-territorial as private and irrelevant to citizenship, the Hindu nationalist as subordinate to a larger unity.
• His work on ethnic violence supplies the second half. Comparing paired cities with similar demographics but different records of violence, he found the decisive variable to be inter-communal civic engagement — associational life, trade bodies and unions cutting across the identity line, which is an argument for federal and associational density rather than for suppression.
• External involvement is one factor among several and should be stated as such: least deniable in Kashmir, where infiltration and material support were established features of the insurgency from the early 1990s, and second in the North-East, where groups maintained camps across the Myanmar and, earlier, East Pakistan borders. External support has rarely created an Indian movement; it has extended the life of movements whose origins were domestic, which is why removing it shortens a conflict without settling it.
• Selig Harrison’s India: The Most Dangerous Decades, published in 1960, argued that linguistic and regional pressures would probably tear the union apart or force it into authoritarian rule to survive.
• It was comprehensively falsified, and the manner matters: the union survived not by resisting linguistic pressure but by yielding to it. Harrison is the best anchor for that counter-intuitive claim because he stated the opposite prediction clearly enough to be tested.

Theory	Core mechanism	Best-fitting case	Principal weakness
Rudolph and Rudolph	Democracy activates rather than dissolves identity	Linguistic states, regional parties	Does not predict which regions
Juergensmeyer	Culture of poverty hardens into identity	The North-East	Deprivation is commoner than movements
Jannuzzi	Culture of affluence protects prosperity	Punjab in the Green Revolution	Affluence more often produces bargaining
Hardgrave	Uneven development across a visible boundary	Telangana, Vidarbha	Needs a pre-existing cultural line
Weiner	Nativist claim to modern-sector jobs	Bombay, Assam, Mulki agitations	Explains nativism, not autonomy demands
Iqbal Narain	Politics of opposition	Episodic statehood agitations	Misused to dismiss real grievance
Baruah	Regional identities older than the national one	Assam and its internal minorities	Explains persistence, not intensity
Brass	Elite competition constructs identity	Punjab’s shift between markers	Underplays genuine attachment
Prerna Singh	Subnational solidarity funds public goods	Tamil Nadu, Kerala	Hard to replicate by design
Kohli	Inverted-U, contained by power-sharing	Most Indian movements	Describes shape better than cause

Threat or Resource?

The question is not rhetorical. Both positions have serious support, and each is right about a different set of cases.

• The territorial-threat school begins from the proposition that regionalism is territorial in expression, and any claim expressed in territory carries an implicit challenge to the state’s monopoly over it.
• Ryan Griffiths places India among the most secessionist-prone countries in the world on the sheer count of movements it has faced.

“India is one of the most secessionist-prone countries in the world.” — Ryan D. Griffiths

• The management school counters that regionalism is not intrinsically a threat and that outcomes turn on management.
• James Manor argues that ethnic movements in India threaten neither territorial integrity nor democracy nor social cohesion, because Indians do not carry fixed, exclusive identities: religion, language, caste, region and class overlap and cross-cut, and the fluidity prevents lasting fault lines forming along any single axis.
• Rajni Kothari reads ethnic mobilisation as part of modernisation and as the assertion of peripheral communities who bore the costs of a destructive development model, with the state’s own homogenising drive as a proximate cause.
• Dipankar Gupta treats it as less a popular passion than a creation of vested interests, which would make it manageable by changing those interests’ incentives; Hamza Alavi’s comparative work on India and Pakistan reaches the same conclusion from the other side, treating ethnic categories as neither given nor objective.
• Regionalism creates a second arena of accountability, and supplies real federal content to a centralised text, because the states’ leverage in the Finance Commission, the GST Council and the delimitation debate rests on regional mobilisation rather than on constitutional provisions.
• The counter-case cannot be waved away. Nativism is a real form, and attacks on North Indian workers in Maharashtra, Bihari migrants in Assam and Hindi-speaking labour elsewhere are attacks by citizens on citizens.
• It corrodes common citizenship, since Article 15 forbids discrimination on grounds of place of birth and Article 19(1)(e) guarantees residence anywhere in India.
• It can be lethal at scale, as the Nellie massacre of 1983 and the Manipur conflict from 2023 show, and its logic has no natural terminus, since every unit created for an indigenous population creates a new minority with an identical case.
• The honest conclusion is conditional. Regionalism expressed as a claim on the state is a resource; regionalism expressed as a claim against fellow citizens is a liability; and the same movement often contains both.

The Integrationist Toolkit

Against regional aspiration the Union has deployed four families of instruments. They are usually listed; they are rarely distinguished by how well they worked.

Constitutional and institutional instruments

• Single citizenship means no state can define who belongs to it, and rights of movement, residence, property and trade run across state boundaries.
• A single integrated judiciary applies both Union and state law through one hierarchy culminating in the Supreme Court, preventing divergent constitutional cultures forming in different regions.
• The All India Services create a nationally circulating administrative class that is a state’s senior bureaucracy and the Union’s institutional memory at once.
• A single Election Commission under Article 324 conducts elections at both levels, removing electoral administration from regional control.
• The emergency provisions, particularly Article 352, convert the federation into a unitary system for the duration.
• Articles 355 and 356. Article 355 places on the Union the duty to protect states against external aggression and internal disturbance; Article 356 supplies the instrument, and its use in disturbed regions has been integrationist as well as partisan.
• Article 3 permits Parliament to create, merge, alter and rename states by ordinary majority, the affected legislature being entitled only to express a view. This is the provision that made every territorial accommodation possible.
• The Eighth Schedule and official-language policy. Recognition in the Eighth Schedule, now covering twenty-two languages, converts a linguistic demand into a status conferred by the Union, and the Official Languages Act 1963 with its 1967 amendment guaranteed the indefinite continuance of English alongside Hindi.
• A single national market, secured by Articles 301 to 307 and completed by the Goods and Services Tax, replaced a patchwork of state levies with one tax administered through a joint council.

Political, symbolic and coercive instruments

• The accommodation of regional parties in national coalitions was the most powerful integrative device of the 1989–2014 period, with the DMK, AIADMK, Telugu Desam, Akali Dal, Asom Gana Parishad and National Conference holding Union ministries and shaping national policy. A party that helps govern India cannot easily describe India as an alien imposition.
• The accord is the characteristic instrument, with a stable structure: a negotiated text, disarmament, a package, and an insurgent leadership converted into an electoral formation. Its record is mixed — the Mizo Accord ended an insurgency permanently, the Punjab Accord’s central provisions were never implemented, and the Assam Accord’s core clauses stayed contested for three decades.
• National symbols — flag, anthem, emblem, shared commemorations — do the routine work of making national identity habitual.
• The language question was handled by retreat rather than symbol. Hindi’s planned displacement of English by 1965 was abandoned, and the three-language formula of 1968 was the compromise; it was applied asymmetrically, with non-Hindi states teaching Hindi and Hindi states rarely teaching a southern language, which is the grievance underneath today’s dispute.
• The National Integration Council, constituted in 1961, was meant to be the standing forum for these questions and has met infrequently with slight influence; Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, launched in 2015, pairs states for structured cultural exchange, with effects that are hard to measure.
• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958, extended to Jammu and Kashmir in 1990, permits forces in areas declared disturbed to search, arrest and use lethal force, with prosecution requiring Union sanction.
• The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, amended repeatedly and most consequentially in 2019, provides for banning organisations, extended pre-charge detention and the designation of individuals as terrorists; central armed police forces and the Disturbed Areas Acts complete the coercive set.

Asymmetric federalism as the standing integrative device

Asymmetry is what allows one constitutional order to hold regions with radically different histories, and it is the most distinctive Indian contribution to federal practice.

• Article 371 gives the Governors of Maharashtra and Gujarat special responsibility for development boards covering Vidarbha, Marathwada, Saurashtra and Kutch — an early acknowledgement that sub-regional grievance needed an institutional answer.
• Article 371A for Nagaland is the strongest of the family: no Act of Parliament on Naga religious or social practices, customary law and procedure, the administration of justice according to Naga customary law, or ownership and transfer of land applies unless the state assembly so decides.
• Article 371B provides a committee of the Assam assembly on tribal areas; 371C a hill areas committee in Manipur; 371D and 371E equitable opportunity in employment and education in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana; 371F carried Sikkim’s 1975 accession terms into the Constitution; 371G and 371H repeat the Nagaland pattern for Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh; 371-I concerns Goa’s assembly; and 371J, added by the 98th Amendment in 2012, provides a development board and reservations for the Hyderabad-Karnataka region — the most recent addition, and evidence the device remains in use.
• The Fifth Schedule governs scheduled areas through the Governor’s power to modify the application of laws and a Tribes Advisory Council; the Sixth Schedule goes much further, creating autonomous district and regional councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram with legislative powers over land, forests, shifting cultivation, inheritance and social custom, together with their own courts.
• Article 370 was the extreme case of the same instinct, and its removal in 2019 is the only occasion on which the Union has reduced asymmetry rather than extended it.
• The Sixth Schedule model has a real limitation. Paragraph 12A provides that where a district council’s law conflicts with the state legislature’s, the state’s prevails, and councils have often functioned as an additional layer of patronage rather than genuine self-government.

Testing the central claim

The most defensible general statement is that India has accommodated almost every regional demand it could translate into a constitutional form, and fought almost every one it could not. The claim deserves testing rather than assertion.

• Evidence for. Linguistic states were conceded, new states created in every decade, Article 371 provisions written for eleven states, Sixth Schedule councils multiplied, and accords converted insurgent leaderships into governments — every one a demand the constitutional order could express.
• The demands that were fought — Naga sovereignty, Khalistan, Kashmiri azadi, an independent Assam — were inexpressible in constitutional terms, since each required the Union to surrender territory. Punjab is the clean demonstration: the Punjabi Suba demand was translatable and granted, the sovereignty demand untranslatable and fought.
• Evidence against. Translation was often available and refused for years — Telangana was recommended in 1955 and created in 2014, and the interval produced two violent agitations. The Union has also fought perfectly constitutional demands, Gorkhaland being a statehood claim under Article 3 that has produced repeated cycles of agitation and force. And the 2019 reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir removed a constitutional accommodation rather than creating one, which the general claim does not anticipate.
• The refined version. India accommodated demands that were constitutionally translatable and politically convenient to translate, and fought the rest; accommodation came late and after violence far more often than in anticipation of it.
• The counter-insurgency claim survives the refinement. Mizoram is the strongest case in Indian internal security: military operations from 1966 did not end the insurgency, and an accord in 1986 with statehood and Article 371G did, permanently.

Force has ended movements in India; only federalism has ended grievances.

The Reorganisation of States

The redrawing of India’s internal map is the country’s largest single act of federal accommodation, and it happened in three distinct waves with three different logics.

Antecedents, and the retreat from the promise

• The Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918 acknowledged that provincial boundaries inherited from conquest and administrative convenience were unsuited to representative government.
• The Congress reorganised itself on linguistic lines in 1920, creating provincial committees corresponding to linguistic areas, so the party was internally federal on language a generation before the state was; the Nehru Report of 1928 endorsed redistribution of provinces on a linguistic basis.
• Gandhi advocated linguistic provinces on the ground that self-government conducted in a language people do not speak is not self-government, and that administration in the mother tongue was the precondition of participation.
• The Dhar Commission of 1948, the Linguistic Provinces Commission under S.K. Dhar, reported against linguistic reorganisation, holding that the primary criterion should be administrative convenience — contiguity, financial viability, security and capacity to develop — and that language as the organising principle would be divisive at a moment of maximum fragility.
• The JVP Committee of 1949 — Nehru, Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya — reached the same conclusion, placing unity, security and economic development first. It left one door open, conceding that Andhra might be considered if sentiment were overwhelming and the claims to Madras city could be settled, and that opening is where the subsequent history entered.

Sriramulu, Fazl Ali and the Act of 1956

• Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian and freedom-movement veteran, began a fast unto death in October 1952 for a separate Andhra state and died on 15 December 1952 after fifty-eight days.
• The resulting violence made the policy unsustainable within days. Andhra State was announced almost immediately and came into being on 1 October 1953; once one linguistic state existed, refusing the others became indefensible.
• The States Reorganisation Commission was appointed in December 1953 with Fazl Ali as chairman and H.N. Kunzru and K.M. Panikkar as members, reporting in 1955.
• It accepted language as an important basis but refused to make it the sole one, weighing national unity, financial and administrative viability and the requirements of planning, and it rejected “one language, one state” — which is why Hindi-speaking India was never unified and why the principle was applied asymmetrically from the start.
• The States Reorganisation Act 1956 implemented most of its recommendations, producing fourteen states and six union territories, and the Seventh Amendment abolished the fourfold Part A, B, C and D classification inherited from princely integration.
• Two recommendations were rejected, and both mattered: a separate Telangana, refused in favour of a merged Andhra Pradesh, and a bilingual Bombay, which lasted four years.

Year	Change	Basis
1953	Andhra State created from Madras	Language, after Sriramulu’s death
1956	States Reorganisation Act — 14 states, 6 UTs; 7th Amendment	Language plus viability
1960	Bombay divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat	Language, after sustained agitation
1963	Nagaland created from Assam	Ethnicity and insurgency settlement
1966	Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh as a UT, hill areas to Himachal Pradesh	Language, conceding the Punjabi Suba
1971	Himachal Pradesh made a full state	Hill-region identity, administration
1972	Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya made states	Ethnicity and princely-state history
1975	Sikkim admitted by the 36th Amendment	Accession, with Article 371F
1987	Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa	Accord settlement; ethnicity; sub-regional identity
2000	Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand	Development deprivation, tribal identity, governance
2014	Telangana	Development deprivation and sub-regional identity
2019	Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act — two union territories	Security and constitutional restructuring

• The 2019 event is categorically different from everything above it. For the first time a state was not divided into states but reduced to union territories, reversing a direction of constitutional traffic that had until then run only from union territory towards statehood.

The counter-intuitive outcome, and the Pakistan comparison

Linguistic reorganisation was expected to encourage fissiparous tendencies. It produced the opposite, and the mechanism is worth setting out precisely.

• Before reorganisation, language was a national question. Every linguistic community pressed its claim in Delhi against every other, and the natural coalition was of aggrieved language groups against the centre.
• After reorganisation, language became a state question. Each community had a state where its language ran administration, education, courts and public employment, and there was nothing further to demand from Delhi.
• The grievance was converted into ordinary politics. Competition over language moved inside the state — dialects, minority-language provision, recruitment rules — which is exactly the kind of dispute democratic politics handles routinely.
• A potential secessionist grievance was defused before it formed in every case except where the linguistic claim was refused, which is why the refusal in Punjab until 1966 was so costly.
• The Pakistan comparison is the strongest available evidence. Bengali speakers were a majority of Pakistan’s population; Urdu was declared the sole national language in 1948; the language movement produced deaths in Dhaka in February 1952; Bengali was conceded only in 1956 and the refusal of political weight persisted; and the sequence contributed directly to the secession of East Pakistan in 1971.

India kept its languages by giving each of them a government, and lost none of its territory in the process.

Louise Tillin: three phases, and the primacy of political timing

Louise Tillin’s Remapping India is the most systematic study of Indian state formation and makes two distinct arguments.

• The first is a periodisation. Phase one, the 1950s and 1960s, reorganised the peninsula on a linguistic logic — Andhra, the 1956 Act, Bombay’s division, Punjab in 1966.
• Phase two, the 1960s and 1970s, reorganised the west and above all the North-East on a logic of ethnicity, where tribal identity rather than language was the unit.
• Phase three, the twenty-first century, reorganised the Hindi heartland and added Telangana on a stated logic of good governance and development, justified by administrative unmanageability and regional backwardness rather than by culture.
• The second argument is the more useful. Whatever the stated logic, the timing of state formation has been dictated by the interest of the ruling party at the centre.
• Telangana was postponed for decades and announced shortly before a general election; Uttarakhand was created by the BJP to consolidate its position in the hills; and Lalu Prasad Yadav accepted Bihar’s bifurcation because removing the tribal south consolidated the RJD’s arithmetic in what remained.

Jaffrelot, and the sociological and political-economy readings

• Christophe Jaffrelot reads state formation, including linguistic reorganisation, as a political and caste phenomenon. Nehru resisted linguistic states out of concern for the Congress system — regional leaderships with independent bases would weaken an all-India party — even while publicly calling multilingual states showcases of India’s unity in diversity.
• On Telangana in 1956, the Commission accepted the case for a separate state; Nehru rejected it and substituted a gentleman’s agreement on safeguards within a merged Andhra Pradesh, the operative reason being that Telangana was a communist stronghold whose position a separate state would entrench.
• On the caste consequence, linguistic reorganisation was the vehicle by which dominant agrarian castes consolidated state power — Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh, Marathas in Maharashtra, Patidars in Gujarat, Jats in Haryana, Lingayats and Vokkaligas in Karnataka.
• Ramachandra Guha and Yogendra Yadav read statehood demands sociologically, as assertions by marginalised sections claiming a share in power and development: a new state creates a legislature, cabinet, bureaucracy and capital in which previously peripheral groups can hold office. The tribal cases fit best, though new states have frequently been captured by the same elites who dominated the parent.
• Atul Kohli’s political-economy reading is sharper: state creation follows the requirements of economic policy. The decisive consideration behind Chhattisgarh was the Union’s liberalised mining policy, and a state carved around a mineral belt with no alternative revenue has little option but to open its minerals to investment.

Reading	Driver of state formation	Case
Sociological (Guha, Yadav)	Assertion by marginalised groups	Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh
Political economy (Kohli)	Economic policy requirements	Chhattisgarh and mining liberalisation
Good governance	Administrative manageability	Uttarakhand and the Hindi-heartland case
Political (Tillin, Jaffrelot)	Electoral interest of the ruling party	Telangana’s timing; Bihar’s bifurcation
Caste (Jaffrelot)	Consolidation of dominant castes	Linguistic states of the 1950s and 1960s

The Small-States Debate

Whether India should have many more states than it does is a genuinely open question, and both sides carry serious argument and serious evidence.

The case for

• The governance argument is the core. A smaller unit is easier to administer, its capital is closer to its citizens, and the distance between a problem and the authority able to solve it is shorter.
• The ratio argument makes it concrete: there should be a rational relationship between the strength of an administrative apparatus and the population it governs, and in India’s largest states that ratio has no defensible basis.
• Bibek Debroy has argued for far more states than India has, on one formulation at least fifty, on the ground that existing units are unmanageable at their scale.
• The comparison that carries the argument is that the United States governs roughly a quarter of India’s population through fifty states, while India governs its own through twenty-eight states and eight union territories.
• Uttar Pradesh alone would rank among the most populous countries in the world and is administered as a single unit with one chief minister and one secretariat.
• The record of the 2000 creations gives partial support. Uttarakhand has outperformed Uttar Pradesh on most human development indicators since separation, and Chhattisgarh has outperformed Madhya Pradesh on some, notably in public distribution reform that became a national reference point.

The case against

• M.P. Singh and Sudha Pai make the fullest case, and its first proposition is empirical: there is no demonstrated relation between size and governance quality. Tamil Nadu is very large and among the best-governed states; Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are small and are not.
• There is likewise no relation between size and development. Maharashtra remains among the most developed states despite its size, Punjab’s growth story stalled while it stayed small, and Chhattisgarh’s performance rests on extraction rather than broad-based development.
• Fixed costs are real and permanent. A new state needs a capital, secretariat, high court or bench, governor’s establishment, public service commission, full ministry and police headquarters — recurring non-developmental expenditure incurred before a single extra service is delivered.
• More states mean more inter-state disputes, since every new boundary creates a potential water dispute, boundary dispute, asset-and-liability division and capital-sharing problem, and these persist for decades.
• Small states are politically unstable and cheap to destabilise, because with a small assembly a handful of defections changes a government — Goa being the standing illustration.
• Economic viability is questionable in many demands currently pressed; a state without a revenue base becomes structurally dependent on Union grants, acquiring the form of a state and the substance of a union territory.
• The effect on the parent state must be counted, as the Andhra Pradesh–Telangana division left the residual state without Hyderabad, its single largest economic asset.
• Strategic concerns attach to particular demands. Gorkhaland sits on a sensitive border, and its creation would lend weight to external claims about the status of the Darjeeling hills.
• The decentralisation answer is the strongest argument on this side. The 73rd and 74th Amendments already provide the machinery for bringing government close to citizens, so if proximity is the objective, empowering panchayats and municipalities is cheaper, faster and more thorough than creating states.
• The logic of smaller units has no stopping point. If smaller is always better the demand terminates at the village, which argues for genuine local self-government rather than an additional tier of capitals; and e-governance reaches a citizen in a remote district without redrawing a boundary.

	Case for smaller states	Case against
Governance	Manageable scale, shorter route to authority	No demonstrated size–performance relation
Evidence	Uttarakhand’s post-2000 indicators	Tamil Nadu large and well governed; Jharkhand small and not
Cost	Offset by better delivery	Permanent fixed costs of capital, secretariat, court
Disputes	Internal disputes become manageable	New boundaries generate inter-state disputes
Stability	A cohesive smaller polity	Defection-prone assemblies, as in Goa
Alternative route	Statehood is the only real transfer of power	73rd and 74th Amendments already provide proximity

A balanced position, and the shift in the basis of demands

• The distinction that matters is between demands and grievances. A durable aspiration sustained across decades and parties deserves serious consideration; a demand manufactured for a season does not.
• The real deficiency is procedural. India has no standing, principled mechanism for evaluating statehood demands; each is decided ad hoc by the calculation of the government of the day. A second States Reorganisation Commission has been proposed repeatedly and never appointed, successive governments preferring to handle demands case by case — so agitation becomes the only way to prove a demand is serious, which rewards whoever imposes the most disruption.
• The basis of demands has shifted fundamentally, and the shift is one of the clearest patterns in Indian political history.
• The first basis was language, from the 1920s to the 1960s, because language corresponded to a literate public, a press, an administrative medium and a school system, and because the national movement had promised it.
• The second was ethnicity and tribe, from the 1960s to the 1980s, operating where language was not distinctive or not salient — Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, with the Sixth Schedule extending the same logic below state level.
• The third is development deprivation and governance, from the 1990s onward: Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Telangana were argued in terms of backwardness and unmanageability, as are the live demands of Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Harit Pradesh and Saurashtra.
• Why the shift occurred is the substantive question. Language stopped generating statehood demands because the question was settled — after 1956 and 1966 every major linguistic community had a state. Ethnicity receded in the plains for the same reason, remaining live in the hills where councils absorbed the pressure below statehood.
• Development became dominant because it was the grievance reorganisation had not addressed. A state that solved the language problem did not thereby distribute investment evenly within itself, and sub-regional disparity is precisely what linguistic reorganisation left untouched.
• A fourth basis may be forming. The current southern assertion is organised around representation and fiscal share rather than territory, and seeks not new states but a different weighting of existing ones.

The Major Regional Theatres

Five theatres carry most of the analytical weight, and each illustrates a different relationship between demand, instrument and outcome.

Tamil Nadu: the paradigm case of federal absorption

Tamil Nadu is the most instructive case in the field, because a movement that began with an explicit secessionist plank ended as a stable regional party system governing within the Union, without a single armed insurgent group.

• The origin was social rather than territorial. The Justice Party, founded in 1916 as the South Indian Liberal Federation, was a non-Brahmin movement contesting Brahmin dominance of education and public employment in the Madras Presidency.
• Periyar E.V. Ramasamy transformed it through the Self-Respect Movement from the 1920s, attacking caste and Brahminical ritual and, increasingly, the northern and Sanskritic cultural order he identified with them; the claim became territorial when he demanded Dravida Nadu in the 1940s, equipped with a full apparatus of a distinct Dravidian people and civilisation.
• The anti-Hindi agitations of 1937–40 followed the introduction of compulsory Hindi in Madras schools and produced imprisonments, deaths and the order’s withdrawal.
• The DMK, founded in 1949 by C.N. Annadurai after splitting from Periyar, carried the separatist plank into electoral politics while shifting emphasis from social reform to Tamil linguistic pride.
• The agitations of 1965 were decisive. As the fifteen-year deadline for Hindi to replace English approached, protests spread across the state with student mobilisation, self-immolations and dozens of deaths in police action.
• The Union’s response was concession, not suppression. English was guaranteed as an associate official language for as long as any non-Hindi state wished, through an assurance in Parliament and then the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 1967.
• The separatist plank was abandoned in 1963, when the Sixteenth Amendment required candidates and office-holders to swear to uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India, making a secessionist platform incompatible with contesting elections.
• The result was total absorption. The DMK won power in 1967, no national party has governed Tamil Nadu since, a two-party Dravidian system has run for nearly six decades, and the same parties have repeatedly held Union ministries.
• Prerna Singh’s finding attaches directly here. The movement produced a cohesive Tamil subnational identity, and the state’s social development record is among India’s best — making it simultaneously the strongest case for absorption and for regionalism’s productivity.

Punjab: accommodation that came too late

• The Punjabi Suba demand was pressed by the Akali Dal from the early 1950s and resisted for over a decade as a religious demand in linguistic dress — a reading helped by many Punjabi-speaking Hindus returning Hindi as their mother tongue in the census.
• It was conceded in 1966, when Punjab was reorganised into a Punjabi-speaking Punjab, a Hindi-speaking Haryana, hill areas transferred to Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh as a union territory serving as joint capital. The settlement left Chandigarh’s final status and the Ravi–Beas waters open, and both remain unresolved sixty years later — a substantial part of why the settlement did not settle.
• The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 is the pivotal text and is systematically misdescribed. Its political content was a demand for greater state autonomy, restricting the Union to defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications, alongside religious and economic demands, and it was of a piece with the Rajamannar Committee’s recommendations and the West Bengal memorandum on centre–state relations.
• It was read by the centre as a secessionist charter, and the reading hardened both sides: it let the Union treat negotiation as capitulation, and let the movement’s radical wing claim constitutional means were exhausted.
• Militancy grew through the early 1980s, with armed groups operating from the Golden Temple complex and a rising toll of targeted killings.
• Operation Blue Star in June 1984 removed the armed groups at very high cost to the Akal Takht, to the shrine’s sanctity and to Sikh sentiment across India and the diaspora.
• The assassination of Indira Gandhi in October 1984 was followed by the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984, in which thousands were killed and whose accountability remains a live grievance.
• The Rajiv-Longowal Accord of July 1985 conceded Chandigarh to Punjab and referred the territorial and river-water questions to commissions and tribunals. It failed for two reasons: Harchand Singh Longowal was assassinated within weeks of signing, and the Chandigarh transfer was repeatedly deferred and never effected.
• Militancy was suppressed by the early 1990s through sustained police operations, at heavy cost in extrajudicial killings and disappearances.
• The lesson is that a demand conceded thirteen years late is not the same demand, and that the interval between grievance and concession is where movements radicalise.

Jammu and Kashmir: from asymmetric accommodation to centralised administration

• Accession occurred in October 1947 under an Instrument of Accession on the same terms as other princely states — defence, external affairs and communications — with the difference that the state’s own constituent assembly would settle the remaining relationship. Article 370 gave effect to that, limiting Parliament’s power to the acceded subjects and requiring the state government’s concurrence for anything further.
• The Delhi Agreement of 1952 between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah settled the operating terms — Indian citizenship with state subject rights preserved, a state flag alongside the national flag, a head of state elected by the state legislature, and limited application of fundamental rights.
• Abdullah’s dismissal in 1953 began the long erosion, as successive presidential orders under Article 370(1) extended central provisions until, by the 1980s, much of the Constitution applied and the autonomy was largely formal.
• The 1987 election is the hinge. Widely regarded as manipulated, it discredited the electoral route for a generation, several of whose members became the first commanders of the armed insurgency.
• The insurgency from 1989 brought AFSPA’s extension to the state in 1990, the displacement of the great majority of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, and a security presence that became the dominant fact of civic life.
• The interlocutors appointed by the Manmohan Singh government reported that the central demand across the Valley was the restoration of autonomy rather than independence — significant because it identified a demand that was constitutionally translatable.
• August 2019 replaced the arrangement entirely. A presidential order under Article 370(1) applied the whole Constitution to the state and amended Article 367 so that the reference in Article 370(3) to the “Constituent Assembly” would read “Legislative Assembly” — which was then dissolved, the state being under President’s Rule. A statutory resolution followed, and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019 split the state into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir with a legislature, and Ladakh without one.
• In Re: Article 370, decided on 11 December 2023, upheld the abrogation, held Article 370 a temporary provision, held that the state retained no element of internal sovereignty after accession, and directed restoration of statehood at the earliest and elections by September 2024, recording the Solicitor General’s undertaking.
• The Delimitation Commission of 2020–22 raised assembly seats from 83 to 90 — six to Jammu and one to Kashmir — altering the regional balance and generating its own controversy.
• The political realignment ran through the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration formed in 2020, the district development council elections of that year, and the assembly elections of September–October 2024, the first in a decade, which returned a National Conference-led government committed to restoration.
• Statehood has still not been restored. Petitions seeking a direction remain before the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly extended the Union’s time to respond, while the elected government presses the demand through cabinet resolution and public campaigning.
• Ladakh has become the region’s second live question. It welcomed union territory status in 2019 and then found itself without a legislature, and its demands consolidated around statehood and Sixth Schedule protection for a predominantly tribal population, pressed by the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance.
• The Union conceded substance while refusing form. In 2025 it notified a domicile-based policy reserving 85 per cent of posts for residents, reserved one-third of the seats in the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils for women, and recognised additional regional languages.
• The agitation nonetheless escalated. Protests in Leh in September 2025 turned violent with four deaths; Sonam Wangchuk was detained under the National Security Act and released in March 2026; and talks with the Ministry of Home Affairs have resumed without agreement on statehood or the Sixth Schedule.
• The analytical frame. In 2019 an asymmetric federal accommodation was replaced by a centralised administrative arrangement, and the open question is whether ordinary federal politics can now do the work that special status was designed to do. Ladakh is the sharpest test, because it received exactly what abrogation promised — direct central administration, an end to intermediation by Srinagar — and has responded by demanding the constitutional protections abrogation removed elsewhere.

The North-East: three problems, not one

The commonest error is treating the region as one problem. It contains three, with different causes and different solutions.

Indigeneity and migration

• The Assam movement of 1979–85, led by the All Assam Students Union, demanded detection, deletion from electoral rolls and deportation of undocumented migrants, and produced extreme violence — most notoriously the Nellie massacre of February 1983, in which over a thousand people were killed in a single day.
• The Assam Accord of 1985 settled it on paper, fixing 24 March 1971 as the cut-off for citizenship, with later entrants to be detected and expelled, alongside safeguards for the Assamese people under Clause 6.
• The accord produced the Asom Gana Parishad, formed from the movement’s leadership, which won the 1985 election — the classic Indian conversion of a movement into a government.
• The National Register of Citizens exercise, conducted under Supreme Court supervision and completed in 2019, applied the Accord’s cut-off and excluded roughly 1.9 million people, satisfying neither those who thought the number too high nor those who thought it too low.
• The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 cut across the Accord’s logic by offering accelerated citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from three neighbouring countries who entered before 2014 — which in Assam meant regularising a population the Accord defined as foreign.
• The Supreme Court upheld Section 6A of the Citizenship Act in October 2024 by a four-to-one majority, sustaining the provision that gives the Accord’s 1971 cut-off legal force, and thereby constitutionalising the Accord’s central bargain.
• Tripura shows what the anxiety is about. Sustained migration turned the indigenous tribal population into a minority in its own state, producing insurgency from the 1970s and eventually a Sixth Schedule council covering most of the state’s area.

Autonomy and statehood

• The region’s map was made with the same instrument used elsewhere, but on ethnic rather than linguistic lines: Nagaland (1963), Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura (1972), and Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh (1987).
• The Mizo Accord of 1986 is the most successful settlement in Indian counter-insurgency. Two decades of conflict from 1966 had exhausted both sides; the settlement gave the Mizo National Front’s leadership the state government and statehood with Article 371G protection; Laldenga, who had led the insurgency, became chief minister; and the state has been peaceful since.
• The Naga question is the oldest unresolved armed conflict in the region. A plebiscite claim dates from 1951 and the Naga National Council’s insurgency from the 1950s, and statehood in 1963 with Article 371A did not resolve the sovereignty claim.
• The ceasefire of 1997 with the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) has held for nearly three decades and has been accompanied by hundreds of rounds of negotiation; the Framework Agreement of 2015 recorded an agreed basis for settlement in deliberately ambiguous terms of shared sovereignty and coexistence.
• Three demands remain outstanding, each constitutionally difficult: a separate Naga flag, a separate Naga constitution, and Nagalim, a greater Nagaland uniting Naga-inhabited areas across four states, which no neighbouring state government will accept.
• The eastern Naga demand was settled separately and recently. The Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation had demanded a distinct Frontier Nagaland state for the most under-developed districts, and in February 2026 the Union government, the Nagaland government and the ENPO signed an agreement creating a Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority covering the six eastern districts of Tuensang, Mon, Kiphire, Longleng, Noklak and Shamator, with 46 subjects devolved, a separate secretariat and population- and area-based funding, expressly without affecting Article 371A.
• It is a textbook instance of the general pattern: a statehood demand met with a sub-state autonomous authority carrying most of the substantive powers and none of the symbolism, accepted because the underlying grievance was developmental rather than sovereign.

Territory and ethnicity within states

• The Bodo movement is the clearest case of Baruah’s recursive problem — a minority within Assam pressing against Assam the case Assam had pressed against Delhi.
• Three accords mark its course. The 1993 accord created a Bodoland Autonomous Council with contested boundaries that quickly collapsed; the 2003 accord created the Bodoland Territorial Council under the Sixth Schedule; and the 2020 accord brought the remaining National Democratic Front of Bodoland factions into the settlement, disbanded the armed groups, expanded the council’s powers and provided a development package.
• The 2020 settlement has largely held, though implementation of specific clauses — expansion of the territorial region and scheduled tribe status for certain communities — remains contested and is periodically pressed by student organisations.
• The Manipur conflict from May 2023 is the gravest current crisis and combines every element the region contains. Violence between the valley-dwelling Meitei majority and the hill-dwelling Kuki-Zo communities followed a court direction on consideration of scheduled tribe status for Meiteis, and turned on land rights across the hill–valley divide, control of forest land and poppy cultivation, and migration across the Myanmar border.
• The Kuki-Zo demand crystallised into administrative separation, either a separate administration or a union territory, which Meitei organisations and the state government reject absolutely.
• President’s Rule was imposed in February 2025 after the chief minister’s resignation, extended through the year, and revoked in February 2026 with a new state government formed on an explicitly power-sharing basis. The underlying territorial and status questions remain unsettled.

AFSPA runs through all three

• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 was enacted for the Naga hills and extended progressively across the region, and it is the single institutional fact connecting the three problems.
• The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee, appointed after the protests over the death of Thangjam Manorama, recommended in 2005 that the Act be repealed with genuinely necessary powers relocated into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The recommendation was not accepted.
• The judicial limit was set in 2016. In Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that the Act’s immunity does not extend to excessive or retaliatory force, that allegations of fake encounters are subject to investigation, and that action in a disturbed area is not beyond judicial scrutiny.
• The current direction is withdrawal by degrees, with disturbed-area notifications progressively reduced in Assam, Nagaland and Manipur since 2022, though the Manipur conflict interrupted the trend there.
• The honest assessment is that the Act has let the state hold ground it could not otherwise hold, and that in six decades it has not produced a single settlement. Every settlement in the region was produced by an accord.

“…durable challenges to the integrative and accommodative capacity of Indian democracy.” — Clemens Spiess, on the North-East

Telangana: the completed case

• The grievance begins with the Mulki rules of the Nizam’s Hyderabad State, reserving government employment for those domiciled in the state, which the region expected to survive the merger with Andhra in 1956.
• The States Reorganisation Commission had itself recommended a separate Telangana, proposing it remain distinct at least until 1961, when its assembly could decide on merger by a two-thirds majority.
• The recommendation was overruled, with a gentleman’s agreement providing safeguards on employment, education, revenue allocation and a deputy chief ministership.
• The safeguards were not honoured, and the perception of their violation produced the 1969 Jai Telangana agitation, in which hundreds of students were killed in police action; the 1972 Jai Andhra agitation, prompted by the Supreme Court upholding the Mulki rules, was its mirror image and showed the grievances were symmetrical.
• The Six-Point Formula of 1973 attempted a settlement through Article 371D, with local reservation in employment and education and an administrative tribunal, and held the arrangement together for a quarter-century.
• The Telangana Rashtra Samithi, founded in 2001, revived the demand as an electoral project and made it the organising axis of the region’s politics for more than a decade.
• Bifurcation came in 2014 through the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, with Hyderabad as a shared capital for ten years.
• The successor disputes remain live — Krishna and Godavari waters, allocation of assets, institutions and employees, and the Polavaram project — illustrating that bifurcation transfers internal disputes into the inter-state arena, where they become far harder to resolve.

The South and the new form of regional assertion

The most significant regional assertion in India today is not territorial. It concerns representation and fiscal share, and it is conducted by governments rather than movements.

• Delimitation is the sharpest of these questions. Article 82 requires readjustment after each census; the 42nd Amendment (1976) froze allocation on the 1971 census and the 84th Amendment (2001) extended the freeze to the first census after 2026.
• The freeze was a bargain, and the southern argument treats it as one. States were asked to reduce fertility as national policy; those that complied would have lost seats had allocation been updated; the freeze was the assurance that compliance would not be punished.
• The arithmetic of unfreezing is stark. On projections for an expanded house, Uttar Pradesh would rise from 80 seats to roughly 131 and Tamil Nadu from 39 to about 64, widening the north–south seat gap from around 41 to nearly 94.
• A Joint Action Committee of southern and allied states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Punjab, West Bengal and others — was formed in March 2025, demanding a further twenty-five-year extension of the freeze and that fiscal devolution not penalise demographic performance.
• The question reached Parliament in April 2026 and failed there. The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, proposing to raise the Lok Sabha to 850 seats, remove the requirement that delimitation await the first post-2026 census, and de-link women’s reservation from that census, was defeated in the Lok Sabha on 17 April 2026 by 298 votes to 230, short of the two-thirds majority; the accompanying Delimitation Bill, 2026 and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill were withdrawn.
• The defeat is constitutionally significant well beyond the seat count: a rare instance of a Union government unable to carry a constitutional amendment on a federal question, showing that on territorially defined issues a cross-party bloc of state interests can hold.

The Union’s Implicit Policy, and What Ought to Be Done

There is no published policy on regional demands. Its elements are legible in the case record, and they are consistent across governments of every party.

• Imaginative solutions are acceptable; the constitutional framework is not negotiable. The Union has invented instruments freely — territorial councils, development boards, special articles, shared capitals, indefinite ceasefires — provided the result sits inside the Constitution.
• Dialogue is offered; talks with arms are not. The state will talk to anyone who abjures violence, and if the other side uses force the state will use greater force.
• The political and economic package is the standard offer, and the accord is the characteristic instrument, with a stable structure: a negotiated text, disarmament, a package, and an insurgent leadership converted into an electoral formation.
• Attention follows breadth of support, which is why agitation is functionally rewarded even where it is formally condemned; and the interests of other affected groups are weighed, which is why Nagalim is unachievable and why boundaries have been the hardest part of every Bodo accord.
• Kohli’s prescription anchors the remedial side: more democracy, not less. Regional movements demand a share of power, and the instruments that worked gave a share of power rather than a share of money.
• Local self-government is the answer recommended and not implemented. N.P. Singh argued for strengthening panchayati raj institutions as the response to regional challenge, and the Sarkaria Commission likewise identified strengthening local self-government as the best way to handle such demands; the 73rd and 74th Amendments provided the machinery and the states withheld the substance.
• Gandhi’s village republics are the deeper version of the argument: his case for panchayati raj was not administrative efficiency but that a society as diverse as India could be governed with consent only if most decisions were taken close to the people they affect.
• The reframing that changes the policy question. Regional movements today are better read as a crisis of development than a crisis of nation-building — the nation-building question was settled, and what remains is the unequal distribution of development, which has policy answers: balanced regional development, sub-regional planning, transfers reaching districts rather than stopping at state capitals, and inclusive growth, which addresses the scarcity of modern-sector employment Weiner identified as the engine of nativism.
• Ambedkar’s warning is the note to close on. He held that the interest of the nation must be given primacy over the interest of the party — aimed at exactly the pattern Tillin documents, in which the timing of every territorial decision has tracked electoral advantage.

“The Federation is a Union because it is indestructible.” — B.R. Ambedkar

India’s Comparative Record

The claim that India has handled regional and ethnic challenge better than comparable states is true, and worth stating precisely rather than triumphantly.

• The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 into fifteen successor states along the lines of its own ethno-federal republics, and Yugoslavia disintegrated across the 1990s into war, its ethno-federal structure similarly supplying the units of secession.
• The structural contrast with India is instructive. Both organised their units around titular nationalities with a recognised right of secession, and both suppressed rather than accommodated the politics of those nationalities; India refused the right of secession, tied its units to language rather than nationhood, and permitted vigorous regional politics inside them.
• Pakistan lost its eastern wing in 1971, with language policy central to the sequence: refusing Bengali equal status with Urdu, in a country where Bengali speakers were the majority, converted a cultural grievance into a national one.
• Sri Lanka came close to disintegration after the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 removed Tamil from official status, with a civil war from 1983 to 2009 that ended militarily rather than politically; the Thirteenth Amendment of 1987, creating provincial councils, was the accommodation Indian experience recommended, and was never fully implemented.
• The common variable across all four is the refusal of linguistic and regional accommodation, and India’s divergence is the presence of it.
• Kashmir is the exception that requires acknowledgement rather than explanation away, its complexity owing much to an unresolved international dispute, sustained external involvement and a strategic location that makes it a subject of other states’ policy.
• The claim in its accurate form. India has managed regional challenge better than comparable multi-ethnic states, at a cost including decades of emergency legislation, several tens of thousands of deaths, and one conflict unresolved after seventy-five years. That is a good record and not a clean one.

Conclusion

India’s federal design assumed regional aspiration would be permanent and built instruments to metabolise it rather than suppress it. Those instruments worked in a specific, repeatable way: they converted grievances that had no constitutional form into demands that did. A language without a state became a state; a tribe without a legislature became a council; an insurgent leadership became a cabinet. Where that conversion was made, the movement subsided and the state grew stronger; where it was refused, delayed or reversed, the movement escalated, and the escalation was expensive.

The composition of the challenge has since changed. Language has been settled, ethnicity has largely been absorbed into councils and states, and what remains is a politics of development deprivation below the state level and of representation and fiscal share above it. Both are arguments about distribution, and neither questions the Union’s existence — which is why the older instruments no longer fit. A demand for a fair share of parliamentary seats cannot be met by drawing a new boundary, and a demand for investment in Bundelkhand cannot be met by a flag.

The unresolved cases share one feature. In Kashmir, in the Naga hills and in Manipur, what is contested is not the distribution of resources but the terms of belonging — who the political community is, and on what basis. Those are the questions federalism was invented to defer rather than answer, and the Indian record suggests that deferring them successfully, for long enough, is itself a kind of answer.