By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Practically everybody expected independent India to fall apart sooner rather than later after that proud midnight moment when the British connection was severed in 1947. Of course, there was a certain sourness even to that occasion. Pakistan was born at the same time. Nationalists in both countries felt that the prize of independence had been sullied by a poor deal when the territory was divvied up. Even India, which got the lion’s share.
Actually, in all its years of recorded history, the Indian sub-continent had never been wholly or perhaps I should say uniformly united under one ruler or government. None of the pre-British empires—whether Hindu or Muslim, whether Gupta, Maurya or Moghul—that had managed to control huge swathes of South Asia, often including most of today’s Afghanistan as well, had managed to subdue every inch of territory right down to Cape Cormorin at the southern tip. And control at the farthest reaches of empire had often involved the subordination, not the destruction of preexisting states, states which tended to re-emerge when, after a few generations, an empire began to crumble. Even the English, who did dominate the whole sub-continent—though famously not Afghanistan—found it useful to work through the puppet rulers of once independent princely states in many parts of their colony.
The Hodgepodge
Thus, post-colonial India inherited a patchwork based on at least 14 major languages—major equating to French or German within Europe—and countless locally-treasured dialects and tribal languages, a consequential cultural divide between North and South and a Muslim minority exceeding the population in any Muslim country except Indonesia. And that’s not even an exhaustive catalogue of the diversity the Republic of India would have to hold together.
Was it easy to keep the country together? Not at all. Almost from the beginning, India has been jiggering its internal boundaries to keep people happy, and the most important principal of re-organization has been linguistic. In 1956, the Indian Parliament passed the States Reorganization Act which reduced the hodgepodge of A, B and C states inherited from the English period to 14 statutorily equal states. Today India has 28 states. How did that happen? By popular demand, one might say. Indians learned how to agitate during the independence movement, and they have never forgotten. In short, India’s reaction to sub-national linguistic and cultural aspirations, unlike China’s, has been to satisfy them—within the Indian union, of course. That’s the bottom line.
The Fight for Bombay
Bombay state gave rise to one of the first of these crises. This state, centered around the financial capital now known as Mumbai, was huge in area and contained two major linguistic groups, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, who wanted separate states. That was the easy part. Both groups also wanted the city of Bombay. That was the hard part. (In those early days, the fate of Bombay seemed almost as fraught as resolving the status of Jerusalem does today.) As in all subsequent contests over statehood, there were protests, processions, strikes, police excesses, lives lost, but eventually the Center gave Bombay to Maharashtra—and guess what? The country didn’t explode. Each group of language-speakers had a state in which children could be taught the local language (along with Hindi and English) and in which local customs could be honored and passed on to the next generation. Politics continues in Maharashtra and Gujarat, of course, and often it’s a pretty nasty business, but separatism is not on the agenda.
The original state of Indian Punjab was split, not on linguistic, but on religious grounds: the resulting state of Haryana has a largely Hindu population and the portion still called Punjab is mostly Sikh. However, when a Sikh succession movement developed, it was crushed.
Dravidian Nationalism
The threat of succession by the southern state of Tamilnadu was rooted in Dravidian nationalism, which required different tactics for diffusion. The major languages of India belong to two unrelated families, the Indo-European languages of the north like Hindi, which (if all dialects are counted) is spoken by more Indians than any other South Asian language, and the Dravidian languages which seem to be unique to the sub-continent. Tamil, one of those languages, has an ancient, highly respected literature, and Tamil-speakers were angered when Hindi-nationalists attempted to make Hindi the sole national language of India, replacing a regime in which Hindi and English served jointly. So long as English was retained as a unifying language, Hindi-speakers and Tamil-speakers would have an equal chance of acing the civil service exams; a Hindi only policy would put Tamil speakers and many others at a severe disadvantage. So Tamils took to the streets, and major political leaders spoke of succession from India. Solution? The central government did not impose Mandarin—um, I mean Hindi. English to this day remains a kind of co-national language, and Tamilnadu did not secede. Restiveness disappeared. (By contrast, recall the civil war in Sri Lanka when legitimate Tamil demands were repressed, not met.)
The Fractious Eastern Border
When the Naga people in Eastern India, on the border with Bangladesh and Myanmar, attempted to secede, they too found New Delhi unsympathetic. The Nagas live in rough hill country. Their genetic and cultural heritage is totally unrelated to that of India proper. In addition, a letter in the hand of Jawaharlal Nehru himself seems to have promised that the Nagas would be candidates for not being absorbed into an independent India. But India, once free, chose not to honor that apparent promise, which resulted in years of bloody warfare in mountainous jungle. Nagaland is now a full fledged state of India, and most Nagas, so far as I could see when I was working in Eastern India, are fairly satisfied with the cultural autonomy they enjoy. Nevertheless, the refusal of independence for the Nagas was pretty close to a betrayal, and who knows when the sense of grievance will reassert itself which the refrain, “But Nehru promised.....?”
Not all other ethnic demands have been satisfied, of course. A country cannot be endlessly divided into ever smaller states. This problem is well illustrated by the multitude of insurgencies that have plagued the hilly areas on the perimeter of the state of Assam. Meghalaya managed to move to full separate statehood, with the Khasis in the majority, but so far the Center is resisting demands by the minority Garos to divide this small state yet further. In fact, insurgents in Meghalaya resorted to so much extortion, kidnapping and other violence to get support for their demands for independence that local people were happy to be rid of them and to be subject only to the routine corruption of the Indian police. Manipur, another tiny Eastern state is beset by separatist insurgencies in the hills that surround its lovely lake-focused center. There is no way that these groups on the Indian border will attain full statehood, let alone independence, but they continue to be a drain on resources and, sometimes, lives.
Federalism vs. Centralization
All in all, India’s handling of ethnic and linguistic minorities has been successful in holding the country together and by and large keeping ethnic minorities fairly happy within the union. We could speculate endlessly on why India has chosen to maintain its unity by tolerating a great deal of local autonomy and cultural diversity, while China has favored an absorption policy within which the cultural autonomy demands of Tibetans and Uighers, for example, are beyond the pale. India chose a federal constitution when it became independent after World War II. China retained its ancient preference for extreme centralization.
And that, as they say, has made all the difference.
However, India today has a new internal threat which can’t be handled so neatly. I’ll finish up this series by looking at that.