Do you think that there has been a gradual shift in the basis on which the demands for the creation of new States have been raised in different regions of India? Explain. (2021, 15 Marks)
Yes — but it is a shift in the stated basis more than in the underlying politics. Louise Tillin (Remapping India, 2013) traces three waves of state formation, each justified by a different logic, while showing that party competition has shaped every one of them.
Three phases of justification
| Phase | Stated basis | Cases |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s–60s | Language | Andhra (1953), States Reorganisation Act 1956, Maharashtra–Gujarat (1960), Punjab–Haryana (1966) |
| 1960s–80s | Ethnicity and tribe | Nagaland (1963), Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura (1972), Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh (1987) |
| 2000 onwards | Development and governance | Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand (2000), Telangana (2014) |
- Language came first because it matched a literate public, a press and an administrative medium, and the national movement had promised it. The Fazl Ali Commission accepted it as a major, though not sole, criterion.
- Ethnicity and tribe replaced it in the North-East, where language was plural and the tribe was the unit of identity; the Sixth Schedule extended the logic below statehood.
- Development deprivation and administrative scale dominate today. The 2000 states were justified by backwardness and unmanageable size; Telangana by the diversion of jobs, water and revenue to coastal Andhra. The live demands of Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Purvanchal and Saurashtra speak the same language.
Why the basis shifted
- Settlement of the old question: by 1966 every major linguistic community had a state, so language stopped producing demands.
- The unaddressed grievance: linguistic states did not distribute investment evenly within themselves. Robert Hardgrave’s uneven-development thesis explains why sub-regional disparity — Vidarbha against western Maharashtra — became the new ground.
- Changing social coalitions: Tillin argues that the 2000 states arose as rising low-caste assertion in the Hindi heartland made old boundaries awkward for coalition-building, and the BJP backed statehood to win new support. Ramachandra Guha and Yogendra Yadav read the demands as assertion by marginalised groups; Atul Kohli links Chhattisgarh to mining liberalisation.
Limits of the shift
- Identity persists beneath development: Jharkhand fused adivasi identity with deprivation; Telangana fused a distinct Hyderabad-state history with economic grievance.
- Political timing is constant: Tillin and Christophe Jaffrelot show that the ruling party’s interest decided when demands succeeded — Telangana was recommended in 1955 but conceded only before the 2014 election. Jaffrelot adds that even linguistic states served to entrench dominant agrarian castes.
- Ethnic demands have revived: the Kuki-Zo call for a separate administration in Manipur, Gorkhaland (a Union committee formed on 22 August 2026 to draft a “permanent political solution”), the Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority (agreement of 5 February 2026), and Ladakh’s demand for statehood and Sixth Schedule safeguards are identity-and-security claims, increasingly met with sub-state autonomy.
- Reverse and new axes: the 2019 downgrading of Jammu and Kashmir into Union Territories followed a security logic; southern assertion over delimitation and fiscal devolution seeks a fairer weighting of existing states, not new ones.
Conclusion
The shift is real and gradual — from language to ethnicity to development — because each phase settled one grievance and exposed the next. But it is layered, not linear: identity still supplies the emotion, development the legitimising vocabulary, and party strategy the timing.