Regional Consciousness and National Integration in India

• Nationalism is less a political theory than a sentiment of togetherness: communion, historic connection or a shared ethnic consciousness.
  • It can form around a sense of common defence, a wish to present a people on the international stage, a desire to emerge as an economic and political power, or a religious sentiment.
• Regional consciousness is the awareness through which people identify themselves with a geographical area, on the basis of language or shared ethnicity.
• Regionalism grows out of it: the identification of a group or community with a piece of land.
  • It rests on ethnic consciousness, a striving for economic growth, or an aspiration for cultural identity within the national current.
• Regionalism need not oppose nationalism. It can contribute to the nation’s growth, since its demands bring regional problems to light, and addressing them helps national integration.

Why Regional Consciousness Arises

Disparity and Inter-State Disputes

• In India, regional disparity, between and within States, is a leading cause of regional consciousness. Meeting regional demands can build a stronger nationalism.
  • Regional imbalances between hills and plains have fed separatist feeling in peripheral hill areas, above all in the north-east.
• What disparity looks like: National Multidimensional Poverty in 2019–21 ranged from Bihar (33.8%), Jharkhand (28.8%) and Meghalaya (27.8%) at the top to Keralam, then Kerala (0.55%) at the bottom.
  • Such gaps, set against a shared national market and shared citizenship, are easily read as a regional grievance. The Aspirational Districts and Blocks Programme and backward area planning are responses to them.
• Inter-State disputes are the other main factor. Each type below is a contest over territory, or over what a territory yields.
• Boundary disputes:
  • Maharashtra and Karnataka (Belagavi): the Mahajan Commission reported in 1967. Maharashtra’s claim to Belagavi city was rejected, and the matter went to the Supreme Court. A Lok Sabha answer of 2021 records it as still pending there.
  • Punjab and Haryana: the 1985 accord agreed that Chandigarh would go to Punjab. This was not carried out, and Chandigarh remains a Union Territory serving both.
  • Assam and Meghalaya: a pact of 29 March 2022 settled 6 of 12 disputed areas, along a boundary of 884 km.
  • Assam and Arunachal Pradesh: the Namsai Declaration of 15 July 2022 was followed by a memorandum of 20 April 2023.
  • Assam and Mizoram: a clash on 26 July 2021, at Lailapur and near Vairengte, left six Assam police personnel and a civilian dead.
  • The Union has said such disputes can be settled only with the cooperation of the States concerned, with the centre acting as facilitator.
• River water: the Cauvery, Krishna and Satluj–Yamuna Link are the best-known cases of inter-State river disputes. Almost every major river crosses a State line, and demand keeps rising with population, farming, towns and industry.
• Inter-linking of rivers: river-linking proposals add a further dispute, because donor and recipient States differ on what counts as surplus and deficit.
• Taxation: under GST, States’ revenue was protected for five years, to 30 June 2022, and many asked for longer. The Sixteenth Finance Commission (report tabled on 1 February 2026) kept the States’ share at 41% for 2026–31.
• Capitals:
  • Chandigarh is claimed as above.
  • Hyderabad’s term as common capital of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana ended on 2 June 2024.
  • Parliament passed a Bill on 2 April 2026 making Amaravati the capital of Andhra Pradesh by law.
• Migration:
  • Assam: the agitation against illegal immigration, begun in 1979, ended with the Assam Accord of 15 August 1985.
  • Haryana: a law of 2020 reserved 75% of lower-paid private jobs for locals. The High Court struck it down on 17 November 2023, and the State appealed.
  • The wider pattern is called sons of the soil politics.
• Power sharing: the Supreme Court in 2011 fixed Himachal Pradesh’s share at 7.19% of power from the Bhakra and Beas projects, alongside Punjab and Haryana. Arrears for the earlier period were still being argued long afterwards.
• Mineral exploitation: a nine-judge bench on 25 July 2024 upheld, 8 to 1, the power of States to tax mineral rights. An order of 14 August 2024 allowed dues from 1 April 2005, payable in instalments over 12 years from 1 April 2026.

Forms of Regional Demand

• Separate statehood within the Union is the most common form. It has produced Gujarat and Maharashtra (1960), Haryana (1966), Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand (2000) and Telangana (2014), and live demands for new States continue.
• Autonomy within a State is another: hill councils for Darjeeling and the Sixth Schedule councils of the north-east.
• Linguistic assertion: the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 in Tamil Nadu helped secure the continued use of English under the Official Languages Act.
• Geography shapes these demands. Hill tracts (Uttarakhand), forested tribal plateaus (Jharkhand), dry interior uplands (Telangana) and frontier valleys and hills (the north-east) all have their own resource bases and grievances.
• State-making reflects these forces. Changes since 1956 show the influence of centrifugal forces under India’s unity, and some argue that further division could strengthen them.

The Geographical Setting

• India’s dimensions are vast, in size and in the variety of its physiography. Not every region suits settled agriculture at the same level of technology.
• River basins have attracted concentrated settlement. Deep forests have stayed isolated to a great extent, and some tribal settlements there were long little touched by change elsewhere.
• Natural contrasts run through the land: the old Peninsula and young Himalaya, perennial and seasonal rivers, and the extremes of climate between Dras and Chennai or Mawsynram and Jaisalmer.
• Population contrasts follow from this: the near-empty reaches of Ladakh and the Thar lie in the same country as river valleys and deltas that carry some of the world’s densest farming populations.
• Economic contrasts are as wide. Tribal, farming, factory and trading economies sit alongside one another, and the range of technology runs from simple tools to satellites and computers.
• Such heterogeneity gives India its description as an epitome of the world, and is the raw material of regional identity.

Social Bases of Regional Identity

Ethnicity

• The peopling of India over time has deeply affected the ethnic character of its regions. Classical racial schemes, now replaced by genetic work on mixed ancestries, described the broad pattern as follows:

• The actual picture is far more complex, but recognising these major tendencies of distribution helps in understanding the country’s regional structure.
• Moving from periphery to centre, ethnic distinctiveness loses much of its relevance. Categories merge imperceptibly across the subcontinent through thousands of years of contact.
  • Bernard S. Cohn held that, despite great physical diversity past and present, a broadly Indian physical type can be recognised.
• Ethnicity as a factor of regional difference matters most for tribal people:
  • Negrito communities have largely been assimilated into other groups. Remnants are confined to parts of the Andamans and the Nilgiris.
  • Proto-Australoid communities were pressed into agriculturally poor parts of the Aravalli–Vindhya–Chotanagpur belt, and generally live at a low level of development.
  • Palaeo-Mongoloid and Tibeto-Mongoloid communities have lived in relative isolation for centuries, in the closed mountain worlds of the north and north-east, using low technology in tropical forest ecosystems.
• These identities are being integrated into India’s democratic polity by inducing growth in them.
  • The strains that remain come from unequal development between tribal and adjacent non-tribal communities, and can be removed only by narrowing the gap.

Caste

• Caste remains a potent institution in Indian social life, for all its harmful role. The Constitution abolished untouchability under Article 17.
• Its reach: rooted originally in Hinduism, it has also influenced other religious groups, among them Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. An old saying holds that conversion may change a person’s religion but not his caste.
• Its regional form: the phenomenon is all-pervasive, yet distinct in each region.
  • Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas pointed out that the higher castes have a horizontal unity across the subcontinent, while each is also tied vertically to lower castes in its own regional setting.
  • Selig S. Harrison described Indian caste as a series of regional caste structures, loosely threaded together within an all-embracing Hindu hierarchy.
• For social geography, the key feature is the regional distribution of Scheduled Castes, 16.6% of the population in 2011. Their concentration reflects, in important ways, the incidence of poverty and the varying extent of socio-economic exploitation across regions.

Language

• Language, as the vehicle of communication, is perhaps the most important expression of a group’s social cohesion. Linguistic diversity both reflects regional differences and helps to form regions.
• The extent of diversity has sometimes been overstated.
  • The 1961 Census listed 187 languages. Of these, 94 had fewer than 10,000 speakers each, and 23 accounted for about 97% of the population.
  • In Census 2011, the 22 scheduled languages were the mother tongue of 96.71% of Indians.
• Word and territory are closely tied. Local dialects have since ancient times been named after the lands where they were spoken:
  • Natya Shastra: Avanti, Prachya, Shauraseni and Dakshinatya.
  • Today: Bhojpuri, Bundeli and Awadhi.
• Above the level of dialect, a fourfold regional division appears:

• Cross-fertilisation balances this. It would be an error to stress the regional role of language and overlook exchange between languages over millennia.
  • Over the last three thousand years, each group has come into close contact with the rest.
  • Sumitra Mangesh Katre drew attention to the vocabulary with a pan-Indian character that has grown from this contact.

Religion

• The religious composition of the population is an important web in the country’s social fabric.
• Hinduism began in India and is the system of belief and ritual of the great majority. Its horizontal spread from its cradle in the land of the Sapta Sindhu brought the whole country under its influence.
  • Srinivas distinguished between all-India Hinduism and regional Hinduism.
• Folk religion is deeply rooted in diverse ecologies, so that religious ideas, despite an underlying unity, take specific regional forms.
  • Mother Goddess worship, central to many agricultural peoples, is widespread, but Kamakhya Devi belongs to Kamrup, Durga to Bengal and Vaishno Devi to the north-western foothills.
  • A hierarchy from the village mai to deities of regional and all-India standing has been suggested as the backbone of folk religion’s regional structure.
• Other religious communities tend to cluster:
  • Muslims: a community that older accounts describe as predominantly rural, marked by concentrations in the Kashmir Valley and the adjoining Kargil district, Mewat, Rohilkhand and the upper Doab, the Ganga delta, Malabar and Lakshadweep.
  • Sikhs: extremely mobile, yet concentrated in the districts of Punjab and parts of Haryana.
  • Christians: the great majority in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Goa in older accounts, with clusters in Chotanagpur and the north-eastern States. Census 2011 shows majorities in Nagaland (87.9%), Mizoram (87.2%) and Meghalaya (74.6%).
  • Tribal territories: a strong concentration of animistic and totemistic beliefs.
• Kargil has formed part of the Union Territory of Ladakh since 31 October 2019.
• Religious beliefs are important in people’s spiritual life, but the role of religious diversity in the Indian polity has often been exaggerated.
  • Communities are intertwined within regional systems. They do not form separate national streams facing one another at the level of the nation.
  • A Kashmiri Muslim and a Kashmiri Hindu have far more in common in their overall responses than a Kashmiri Muslim and an Assamese Muslim, or a Kashmiri Hindu and a Tamil Hindu.

Fairs, Shrines and the Arts

• Fairs and festivals have a remarkable traditional role in this process of cultural synthesis, all over the land.
• Places of pilgrimage draw devotees from many parts of India: Hindu shrines, mosques and dargahs, Jain tirthas, Buddhist monasteries and Christian churches.
  • Varanasi, Rameshwaram, Ajmer, Bodh Gaya and Old Goa have national standing, and draw Indians of other religions too.
  • These and regional shrines act as strong nodes of cultural and emotional integration.
  • Their economic functions add to the bond, as at the Pushkar Lake fair, where trade and pilgrimage meet.
  • Domestic tourism extends the same feeling, as travellers find themselves moving within their own country.
• Art forms show the same balance of diversity and unity:
  • Classical music: Carnatic and Hindustani share an aesthetic and technical base, yet each has its own flavour and style. The two still exchange ragas, melodies, techniques and styles.
  • Folk music: each region has its own folk or tribal music, but mutual influence is common. Ballads on heroic themes, folk tales and legends share motifs, styles and techniques across the country, and almost every part has songs tied to the rhythm of the seasons.
  • Instruments: the dhol, madal, mridanga, bansuri and shahnai are found in many regions, with local differences in name, shape and manner of playing.
  • Dance: Kathak, Odissi, Manipuri, Kuchipudi, Bharatanatyam and Kathakali share a heritage of aesthetic principles. Each has evolved its own style, often through contact with the popular and folk dances of its region, which stay closer to people’s daily life.
  • Drama: a great variety of traditional and folk forms exists across regions. Most carry forward principles laid down in the Natya Shastra and follow common or similar conventions.
• Migration of forms and performers mingles communities:
  • Krishna Parijat in the south is performed by Muslim artists.
  • Singer-performers of Kathiawar migrated to Andhra to perform a form of the Ramayana.
  • Dummy horse performances are common to Kachchh and Tamil Nadu.
• Other arts show the same mingling of common and distinct elements: painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, in urban traditions and still more in popular folk traditions.

Unity in Diversity

The Two Sets of Forces

• The essential feature of India’s social geography is a symbiotic relationship between centripetal and centrifugal forces, producing a delicate balance of unity in diversity. The same pair underlies the geographical basis of Indian federalism.
• Centripetal forces were released by the horizontal spread of techniques and socio-economic and cultural traits.
  • These traits entered regional systems and helped join them into larger wholes. They also drew strength from those systems, and changed in the process to play a stronger integrating role.
• Centrifugal forces came from the needs of different ecosystems and people’s interaction with them, which led to regionally specific responses to varying landscapes.
• In an important sense, the history of India is the history of the interaction of these two forces.

What Binds the Country

• Monsoon: despite differing natural environments, the monsoonal rhythm of seasons gives a strong element of uniformity.
  • The alternation of dry and wet seasons, with rain concentrated in a few months, is broadly an all-India experience, though its intensity varies greatly.
  • Its reach has given a natural base for a degree of uniformity in the way people work with nature across the country.
• Great Plains: the plains between the Himalaya and the Peninsula have a unifying role that can hardly be ignored.
• Cultural fusion: cultural and socio-economic traits have spread between regions, and growing exchange has built strong bonds.
  • Saints carried a message of universal brotherhood, and the epics supply themes even for tribal dance and music.
  • Hindu and Islamic traditions have intertwined into a composite matrix on Indian soil, and long periods of foreign rule did not break the country’s cultural ties.
• National home market: inter-regional economic links over about two hundred years have helped unify the country, though constrained by imperial exploitation.
  • British rule struck at the self-sufficiency of the village community and drew most of rural India into a largely unified all-India market.
  • Railways and other communications speeded this, and remain a strong medium of integration.
  • Inter-district and inter-State migration broke the old isolation of regional groups.
  • Rural-urban migration brought together in cities people of different dialects and faiths, as citizens of an emerging India.
• Since 1947: efforts to correct colonial distortions in regional structure, and faster socio-economic development, have consolidated the national market and strengthened the foundations of nationhood.

A Delicate Balance

• Unity and diversity do not grow at each other’s expense. They are symbiotically linked and sustain each other. Over-emphasis on either disturbs the balance.
• Two views misread the polity: India as a monolith, and India as a mechanical mixture of diverse elements put together by the British. Neither grasps the combination of unity and diversity that has made India what it is.

National Integration

Meaning and Dimensions

• The need for national integration refers essentially to four aspects:

• Integration aids modernisation. It involves a readjustment of people’s loyalties: tribal, feudal and parochial values give way to the ends of a democratic, egalitarian and evolving national society.
  • It is thus a movement from traditional allegiances towards a new national identity.
• In functional politics, national integration should mean:

• The sum of it: a condition of unity in diversity in which the parts and the whole are equally valid and mutually dependent.
  • If there were only unity, integration would be unnecessary. If there were only diversity, it would be impossible.
  • So integration is a congruence of diversities that leads to a higher unity, keeping both variety and similarity. It does not convert diversities to uniformity.
  • Not every diversity is divisive. Viable plural societies presume that diversities can be reconciled.

Regionalism and the Nation

• Regionalism and sub-regionalism are unavoidable in a country as vast and expansive as India, and nothing is more basic to the concept of federalism.
  • Once a federal nation-state comes into being and freedom is real, regional sentiments and demands assert themselves. History bears this out.
• Those who defend the nation’s ‘unity’ and ‘integrity’ sometimes treat every defence of regional or sub-regional interest as divisive and disintegrative.
  • This approach is mistaken. In a country of manifest diversity, unity does not mean uniformity, and integration does not mean centralisation.
• Healthy regionalism, including sub-regionalism, has a strong case for existence and growth, seen from a democratic perspective.
• National integration itself involves integrating these viable regions, as a precondition for national identity.
  • Being Indian does not stop one being Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Maharashtrian, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Assamese or Naga.
  • Real national unity grows from a healthy reconciliation of regionalism and nationalism. Unhealthy regional or sub-regional patriotism, like chauvinism, is disruptive.

Challenges

• India’s effort to build one national identity from a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-caste, multi-lingual and multi-regional population faces three main challenges:
  • Inadequate distribution of goods and services, leading to economic disparity and poverty.
  • Persistent socio-economic inequality, between and within rural and urban people.
  • Political populism, in which competing groups exploit divisive communal, caste and regional sentiment.
• Structural violence is built into an unequal society. A society divided within itself lives in tension between affluent and poor, and the frustration of the have-nots can turn to violence.
  • The contrast between a large poor population and an affluent section consuming a disproportionate share of income sets the stage.
  • The figures have moved: National Multidimensional Poverty fell from 24.85% (2015–16) to 14.96% (2019–21), though with wide gaps between States.
• Parochialism is one side of populism: opportunistic competition for votes through populist slogans, and short-term electoral gain from parochial sentiment.
  • Its commonest forms are communalism, casteism, tribalism and narrow regionalism, all harmful to the nation and the country as a whole.
• Exaggerated nationalism is the other side. When valid diversities and genuine sub-national identities are attacked uncritically as divisive or anti-national, the balance between whole and parts, general and particular, is lost.
  • Regimentation is as much an enemy of enlightened nationalism as narrow sectionalism, populist parochialism or bigoted regionalism.

Instruments of Integration

• National Integration Council: it grew out of the National Integration Conference of 28 September to 1 October 1961. It first met on 2–3 June 1962, and last on 23 September 2013.
• The Constitution: a Union of States with one citizenship, an Eighth Schedule that recognises 22 languages, and special provision for tribal areas.
• Language policy: the Official Languages Act, 1963 kept English alongside Hindi, and the three-language formula was adopted in the National Policy on Education, 1968.
• Reorganisation on regional lines: the linguistic reorganisation of States from 1956 accommodated regional identity inside the Union.
• Forums and shared institutions: Zonal Councils, the Inter-State Council and All India Services bring regions together for common work.
• Transport and exchange: railways, highways and domestic tourism carry people across regions and strengthen the feeling of one country.
• Rashtriya Ekta Diwas, observed on 31 October since 2014, marks the birth anniversary of Vallabhbhai Patel.
• Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, announced on 31 October 2015, seeks a sustained cultural connection between people of different regions.

The North East: A Test Case

• Geography: the region’s eight States join the rest of India by the narrow Siliguri Corridor, about 22 km wide at its slimmest, and are otherwise bounded largely by international borders.
• As a geo-cultural region: Tibeto-Burman and Austric speech, Palaeo-Mongoloid and Tibeto-Mongoloid communities, and tribal identities tied to particular hills and valleys give the region a character of its own. Yet it holds many cultures, with Assamese- and Bengali-speaking plains beside numerous hill societies.
• As a geo-political region: its external boundaries and its thin link with the rest of India make it a matter of national security as well as of regional development.
• Federal accommodation: the Sixth Schedule covers tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, the North Eastern Council dates from 1971, and the Mizoram Accord of 1986 ended a long insurgency.
• Unresolved strains: inter-State boundaries within the region remain contested in places, notably along Assam’s borders with Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram.