The centrality of identity
In the late 1940s and 50s, India was going through an enormously challenging phase of state and nation-building. The country had just been partitioned. It fought a war a few months after it became independent. There was a deep fear that the ‘nation’ would disintegrate, making democrats like Jawaharlal Nehru deeply skeptical of any devolution of power. There was reluctance to even mention the term federalism, and the polity thus acquired features of a quasi-federal system—one where the centre was far more powerful than the states.
But institutional designs could not beat the logic of mass politics. In the 50s, demands for linguistic states emerged in the south, initially from the Telegu-speaking regions. Soon after, there was a fierce dispute between Marathi and Gujarati speakers about the status of Bombay. The anti-Hindi and Dravidian movements in Tamil Nadu fused together, posing a formidable challenge to the existing precepts of the Indian nation.
If language was the dominant theme in state restructuring in the south and west, it was ethnicity in the east. Smaller groups had begun to assert and claim separate homelands, with the Nagas waging what has become the longest-running insurgency in this part of the world. The greater Assam region was broken up. Conflicts persist, and the Manipur-Nagaland conflict shows the perils of having communities which live in two bordering states in a polarized context. But one could argue that the disputes may have been even more severe, violent, and visceral if the centre had not given a greater stake to additional stakeholders by carving out newer states.
Indian federalism entered a new stage as regional parties became stronger in the 80s and 90s; they now ran not only states but wielded considerable power in deciding who would run the centre. The centre did not dare to dismiss state governments using the dreaded Article 356. States are today in many ways more powerful than the centre. Witness West Bengal chief minister Mamta Banerjee’s role in scuttling the Teesta Agreement with Bangladesh, or FDI in retail. Newer states have kept coming up, for instance Jharkhand which was a result of an adivasi movement. Powerful movements for Telangana in Andhra Pradesh and Vidharbha in Maharashtra continue. And most recently, UP’s chief minister, Mayawati, has proposed breaking up the state into four parts.
Even a brief glance at the evolution of federalism in India reveals some common patterns.
At each stage—when existence of states was accepted, when language movements forced state reorganization, when regional forces asked for greater powers—conservatives played the national unity card and stoked the disintegration paranoia. India would not survive, they proclaimed, and pushed hard to first stop changes, and then dilute it against popular wishes. There is now a broad consensus that federalism—along with democracy and secularism—is perhaps the most important reason for the survival, and relative success of India.
The second obvious pattern is that federalism is an evolutionary process. What is written out in the constitution, or the way regions are carved out initially, will not necessarily hold. Newer forces and aspirations will emerge, which will have to be accommodated.
And the third trend is that in most instances, demand for new federal entities have emerged because of certain past historical grievances, or by communities which have felt disenfranchised, or by those whose language is ‘peripheral’, or in regions which have been isolated. This is not unique to India. It was the Tamil-speakers who asked for federalism in Sri Lanka, and it is those who live outside the dominant Punjabi belt who push for greater federalism in Pakistan. When identity is the basis for oppression, it becomes the basis for counter mobilization.
This detour into the rest of the region is perhaps essential to place Nepal in perspective. Like elsewhere, the federalism agenda here emerged from impulse for recognition of
identity to address past historic grievances, placing it completely in the political realm. This is very distinct from asking for greater administrative powers, or begging the centre for a higher slice in the budget.
Maoists succeeded in mobilising ethnic minorities, from Magars in the west to Rais in the east, because they sold them the idea of fighting the centralised unitary state which had oppressed them. 52 Madhesis gave up their lives in two movements for federalism because they wanted a state which would be run by people who look like them, speak like them, and they would not be derisively dismissed as dhoti each time they went to the CDO karyalaya. That was the essence of the Madhesh Pradesh demand. When Limbus ask for a federal unit, they recall past conquests and destruction of their economic networks, which was an integral part of their communitarian identity. Tharus place it in the same narrative.
As much as liberal modernists in Kathmandu would like to decry it, the political demand for federalism has emerged and been articulated in terms of group rights. Economic viability is important, and it is unwise to have states in places which do not have a single township, a single big hospital, or a single university, or the minimum population to sustain it. But if a region or a community has certain basic elements, squashing their aspirations of grounds of feasibility is unwise. As a pro-federal friend belonging to a marginalised community, who will have to remain unnamed since he works in an international organisation, once said, “Was Nepal viable when it was conquered? Given its track record, is it viable even now? We can challenge the existence of this broader unnatural construct on the same grounds.”
But while recognising identity, rajnitik agraadhikar or preferential political rights— whereby only a person of the dominant community will get to be elected as chief minister for two terms—must not be incorporated as it violates democratic principles.
Community rights will be recognised in the naming of provinces, in principles of inclusion, in access to natural resources, and will be expressed through electoral outcomes. But creating two classes of political citizens will be reverse racism and antagonize all other minority communities in the new provinces (including but not only Bahuns, Chhetris, Dalits) irreversibly, jeopardising the federal project itself. Janjati groups can organise themselves in political outfits the way they wish. But they should leave it to the logic of democratic politics to decide who runs the states. A constitution must not enshrine newer principles of exclusion.
The SRC and political class thus have a major challenge of finding the right balance - carving out states which recognise identity and ethnicity as a key basis, while not entrenching it in a way that it leaves no room for the other identities a person possesses to flourish.
Posted on: 2011-12-07 07:47
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