Comment: Factors for the growth of regionalism in India. (2001, 20 Marks)
Regionalism is the political mobilisation of a territorially concentrated community around a shared marker — language, tribe, memory of deprivation — to claim resources, recognition or autonomy within the Union. It differs from sub-nationalism, where the community calls itself a nation, and from separatism, which seeks exit. Paul Brass held that in a country of India’s scale regionalism is the permanent feature and national consolidation the episodic achievement; the question is which factors keep feeding it.
Cultural and historical factors
- Linguistic identity has been the most productive marker: the anti-Hindi agitations of 1965, Samyukta Maharashtra and the Punjabi Suba movement. The 1956 reorganisation, following the States Reorganisation Commission, made language the main basis of states, and each state became a platform for regional politics. Its current form is educational — Tamil Nadu’s rejection of the three-language formula in the NEP 2020 and its own State Education Policy (August 2025).
- Historical and ethnic distinctiveness: Sanjib Baruah notes that Tamil, Bengali, Assamese or Naga identities are older than the modern Indian one. In the North-East, tribe, faith and a colonial “excluded areas” legacy sharpened the distance.
Economic factors
- Uneven development: Robert Hardgrave linked regionalism to visible disparity across a boundary — Telangana against coastal Andhra, Vidarbha against western Maharashtra. Affluence can produce it too: Punjab’s Green Revolution prosperity fed resentment over river waters and procurement.
- Sons of the soil: Myron Weiner’s Sons of the Soil (1978) showed that nativism arises when an educated local middle class finds migrants holding the modern-sector jobs it wants — the Shiv Sena (1966), the Assam movement (1979–85), the Mulki agitations.
Political factors
- Political entrepreneurship: Brass’s instrumentalism treats identities as selected and reshaped by elites competing for power. The decline of what Rajni Kothari called the “Congress system” after 1967 opened space for regional parties — DMK, Akali Dal, Asom Gana Parishad, TDP — which institutionalised regional grievance. TVK’s May 2026 victory in Tamil Nadu shows regional politics renewing itself outside the old Dravidian duopoly.
- Centralisation backlash: the Rajamannar Committee (1969) and the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) were responses to a centralising Union. Today the grievance is fiscal — the 16th Finance Commission kept vertical devolution at 41% against eighteen states’ demand for 50%, while cesses outside the divisible pool shrink the effective share — and gubernatorial, over bills withheld and reserved.
- Delimitation fears: southern states that cut fertility fear losing seats once the freeze ends. A Joint Action Committee met in Chennai on 22 March 2025 seeking a 25-year extension, and the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill 2026 was defeated in the Lok Sabha (298–230) on 17 April 2026.
- Unmet autonomy after reorganisation: Ladakh welcomed UT status in 2019, yet by September 2025 protests in Leh for statehood and Sixth Schedule safeguards turned violent, leaving four dead.
Significance and limits
Rasheeduddin Khan separated supra-state, inter-state and intra-state regionalism, and the factors above recur across all three. Two cautions apply. Some demands are manufactured — Iqbal Narain’s “politics of opposition” — and fade when a party returns to office. And nativism turns citizen against citizen, violating Articles 15 and 19(1)(e). Yet Prerna Singh finds that subnational solidarity in Tamil Nadu and Kerala produced better welfare outcomes, and Atul Kohli shows most movements follow an inverted-U, peaking and subsiding once given a share of power.
Conclusion
Regionalism grows from the interaction of durable cultural difference with contingent triggers — disparity, elite competition and central overreach. Because the triggers are political, so is the remedy: federal bargaining, fair devolution and responsive institutions have repeatedly turned regional assertion into a resource for Indian democracy rather than a threat to its unity.