It should have been equally plain that the Congress party would suffer both nationally and in Andhra Pradesh by supporting Telangana's statehood. Andhra is India's first linguistic state. It has sent the largest number of Congress MPs to the Lok Sabha since 2004 and been pivotal in putting the UPA into power. Andhra will probably again slip out of the Congress's influence—just as it did in 1982, when a perceived insult by the Centre to its leaders became an issue of prestige and pride, leading to the ascendancy of NT Rama Rao and his Telugu Desam Party. Andhra returned to the Congress's fold only in 2004.

The Centre was stampeded into promising a Parliament resolution for creating Telangana by a hunger-strike by Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader K Chandrasekhara Rao—a desperate, isolated, discredited leader whose party seemed to be in terminal decline after losing a series of elections. True, Mr. Rao's condition was sinking and he would yank off intravenous tubes. But the government surely could have tranquillised and force-fed him—just as it often does with people's movement activists like Irom Sharmila and Medha Patkar. Instead, Home Minister P Chidambaram made a long-term fateful decision, which revived the Telangana issue and set the Andhra cauldron boiling. Worse, Home Secretary GK Pillai declared that Hyderabad would be Telangana's capital.

All three regions of Andhra have since been on the boil, with daily bandhs and blockades. The Andhra Cabinet has been paralysed. The Home Ministry is confused and vulnerable to all manner of paranoid fears being spread by spy agencies about growing Naxalite influence in Telangana. It's clutching at straws, such as an all-party meeting and a Presidential reference to the Supreme Court under Article 143 of the Constitution.

The January 5 all-party meeting was bound to fail under irreconcilable divisions. Andhra's two biggest parties, the Congress and TDP, are internally split on Telangana and cannot take a half-way coherent stand. The TRS, Bharatiya Janata Party and Communist Party of India back statehood. Mr. Chiranjeevi's Praja Rajyam Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) oppose it. And the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) is waiting and watching.

Art 143 is meant to enable the government to solicit the Supreme Court's opinion on complex questions of law or facts of public importance. But Telangana isn't such a question. It's a political issue rooted in people's perceptions and sentiments about “discrimination” and of finding the best political-administrative framework for their self-expression and development. The government is called upon to exercise a wise, thoughtful, balanced political judgment here. It cannot shift that responsibility to judicial agencies. It must confront the Telangana demand politically, in the best sense of the term.

Three vital issues are involved here: the merit of the case for a separate Telangana, the likely national political effect of its creation, and the agency or means by which to deal with the arising complexities. The case for Telangana is a persuasive one. Culturally, the region, comprising 31 million people, is distinct from coastal Andhra and the western part called Rayalaseema. Telangana has its own identities in ethnicity, language/dialect (with a strong influence of Dakkhani Urdu), food, kinship, natural resources and social interaction. These identities are weightier than the linguistic bond it has with the other two regions.

Telangana is also demarcated politically from them. Administratively, it belonged to the Nizam's Hyderabad state, which also comprised parts of today's Maharashtra and Karnataka and evolved its own administrative system and educational institutions. Above all, Telangana was united by social movements and popular mobilisations in the 1940s—the prolonged Communist-led Telangana Peasant Rebellion, and the movement for liberation from the Nizam's oppressive and reactionary rule— and then again in the early 1950s and late 1970s.

These mobilisations shaped a Telangana consciousness and identity going beyond Telugu. A community thus evolved in the popular imagination. If nations are imagined communities, as historian Benedict Anderson famously describes them, then provinces and states within nations are even more created in the imagination. Their identities are invented and reinvented. A major factor which helped crystallise Telangana's community identity is the economic and political ascendancy since the late 1970s/early 1980s first of coastal Andhra, and more recently, of Rayalaseema.

Thus, the TDP is quintessentially based in the coastal region, which has thrown up aggressive entrepreneurs like Satyam's B Ramalinga Raju, and the Lanco, GMR and GVK groups. For two decades, these business interests consolidated their influence over Andhra politics and also financially exploited it. This meant marginalising the Telangana people, who resented the loss of political influence, land and other resources.

Hyderabad, located inside Telangana, has grown rapidly but chaotically, attracting information technology and biotechnology investors. But these businesses are largely controlled by coastal interests. Since the rise of YS Rajashekhara Reddy, the strong man from Rayalaseema, the centre of gravity of power has shifted towards that region, but Telangana's marginalisation continues. Its people have come to believe that statehood will offer them a framework for addressing their problems better. This may or may not be true. But beliefs matter.

The case for Telangana cannot be convincingly countered by arguing that India's further division beyond linguistic criteria is impermissible, that too many small states weaken federalism, or there is an optimal size below which provincial units become dysfunctional. The States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) in the 1950s defined “language” in extremely broad, undifferentiated terms, thus subordinating many distinct languages and dialects under one hold-all category.

Languages like Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, Dogri, Garhwali, Chhattisgarhi or Santhali, some of which have literatures going back centuries, and their own grammars and sounds, and some of which are spoken by 5 or 10 million, were all categorised as Hindi. This is true of other language-groups too, including Marathi, Bengali, Assamese and Konkani.

Continuing with the all-encompassing language category does not make much sense. It's time to give the smaller languages a place of their own. It is vital to preserve diversity and difference at a time when the world is being impoverished by the tragic erosion or disappearance of languages, species and ways of life, and when an artificial homogeneity is being imposed across nations in attire, food, rituals, body language, even festivals.

Let's put this in perspective. The world's 6.5 billion people live in 190-odd countries. This means the average nation has only about 30-35 million people. If we exclude giant and large entities like China, India, the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, Japan, etc., the average nation's population size falls to 15 million. A majority of countries have between 4 to 10 million people—e.g. Scandinavia and Africa. Many others, including Korea, Iran, the Netherlands and South Africa, have 15 to 75 million people. The provinces/prefectures/states in these are of course much smaller—0.5 to 2 million. So there's nothing odd about a 31 million-strong Telangana—with an area of 11,840 sq km, which exceeds the size of 100 of the world's countries.

We shouldn't be afraid of small states. There's no reason why Uttar Pradesh shouldn't be broken up into five states as Ms Mayawati wants, or even more entities. Contrary to the fears of some CPM leader, smaller states don't weaken federalism. On the contrary, they may improve the Centre's responsiveness to the concerns and demands of small ethnic groups and minorities, including nomadic people (India has nearly 50 million, or more than all Englishmen and -women), forest-dwellers, shepherds and marginal fisherfolk. The CPM opposes Telangana and other small states primarily because it doesn't want to concede the demand for Gorkhaland in North Bengal.

Telangana's move towards statehood will probably encourage politicians to demand statehood for other regions/sub-regions too. It's easy to count at least 20 such demands—from Bodoland and Kamtapur in the East/Northeast to Kutch in the West, from Ladakh in the North to Coorg (Kodagu) in the South, through Vidarbha in the Centre.

Such demands have to be taken on the chin. The best way of dealing with them—and here's the third major issue—would be to establish a Second States Reorganisation Commission which evolves criteria like language/sub-language/dialect, but also including culture, political traditions and social movements. It should do so through public hearings, analysis of backwardness, and inputs by social scientists, administrators and civil society activists.

The SSRC must be broad-based and inclusive, carry credibility and work transparently. It must take a generous, relaxed view of federalism. India is too big, too strong, too secure for its integrity to be undermined by more states, varying types of administrative structures, or diversity. India will show itself to be uniquely resilient if it adopts not one but several federal models together. (IPA Service)