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.(UPSC CSE Mains 2021 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- The demands of new states on the grounds of language, ethnicity and cultural factors were integral part of the preindependence nationalist discourse. After the independence, the euphoria of freedom struggle and ‘Nehruvian consensus’ turned this demands silent. Rather, contrarily, integration of many princely states took a grand momentum. Some areas, e.g. Kashmir and North Eastern states gained some autonomy but unfortunately it had pragmatic presumption.
- Since late 1980s, Indian political spectrum saw different momentum in which it was not that the same game started producing different results rather the rule of game itself had changed. This was visible through recurrent assertion of language of rights, self-respect and non-discrimination by the marginalized groups.
- Indian social-political spectrum soon changed into the pour of political activism which questioned the dominant language of epistemology. In short, this disjuncture was visible through the political consciousness of marginalized (which includes caste, class, gender as well as region). The newly aroused consciousness further intensified with the centralized tendencies of state machineries. This led to the birth of what Sunil Khilnani has called ‘LayeredIndianness’ in which language, caste, class, region became the base to intensify the identity based politics.
- The germination of the ‘layered-Indianness’, according to Khilnani, is due to: the maturing and deeper penetration of the democratic processes in India, people’s responsiveness to it, bottom-up agenda setting and also Indian state’s failure to respond appropriately to the breadth of the change. Resultantly, the Indian political system is going through the phase in which regional/local issues take precedence over national issues.
- The government of India too instituted several commissions to look into the mode of functioning of the constitutionally mandated federal system in the changing social, economic and political context. At the functional ground Indian state’s imagination of nation under the framework of fusion and uniformity have produced a strong centrifugal thrust which is visible through the recurrent demands of new and smaller states.
- Experience shows that the various provisions of constitution have been used, multiple times, to broaden the scope of rights, dignity, equality, liberty as well as justice. At this time it is necessary to re-look at the same platform, with appropriate alteration, to ensure the best possible delivery of justice. Rule of law should be the proper mechanism to deliver the appropriate entities to subjects and same is true for the feedback. Unless the rule of law is respected the demand-supply model of political system would cease.
- At the same time, it is necessary to strengthen the already available platform like- Inter-State Council. Besides this many informal platform could avail the proper facilities for broad deliberation. This would be an effective tool to mitigate the centrifugal thrust of sectarian demands.
- One obvious problems of this is that identity based movements fail to put their demands under deliberative framework, and hence consequentially, articulate the halftruth demands. It also fails to reach what John Rawls has called ‘Reflective-Equilibrium’. Unless imagined notion of truth is not assessed with the all available grounds it falls short of its emancipatory potential. The underlying notion of Rawls’ Reflective-Equilibrium, if applied to the theory of federalism, is that one must continuously keep their imbibed beliefs to check with other’s believes. Continuous revising and refining of beliefs is very important to arrive at a coherent set of larger belief in a human society embedded with identity and sectarian belief-systems.
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