India
The Indian union is going through a shake up, with aspirations of statehood rising in the mainland with much vigour. First a Telengana is to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh. Then there will be a Bundelkhand and Harit Pradesh from Uttar Pradesh; a Mithilanchal from Bihar; a Vidharbha from Maharashtra; a Saurashtra from Gujarat; a Gorkhaland from West Bengal; and a Coorg from Karnataka. This is not to mention all the rumblings in the Northeast, which could give rise not just to a Nagalim or a Bodoland, but a state for every one of the myriad insurgencies. Kashmir, of course, is its own long story, but a different one.
Coerced into announcing the beginning of the process of fashioning Telengana as a separate state from the rest of Andhra Pradesh, the Congress at the Centre had not bargained for the fallout of having buckled under the pressure of the deteriorating health of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) President K Chandrasekhar Rao, who was on an indefinite fast. Violent demonstrations by those opposing the split followed Home Minister P Chidambaram's announcement. The ruling Congress was even subjected to the spectacle of its own MLAs resigning over the Centre's move in solidarity with MLAs of other parties unhappy with the decision. But barely had the Andhra flames died down when the agitation for Gorkhaland picked up steam, perhaps encouraged by the Centre's seeming benevolence in agreeing to carve out Telengana, a demand that was first voiced in 1969, and had surfaced now and again over the past three decades.
Indeed, none of the demands for statehood are new. All the movements demand the creation of a new state symbolising adequate representation, control over the resources of the region, economic prosperity, and the nurturing of ethnic and regional identity. For the first time, demands by sitting chief ministers such as Uttar Pradesh's Mayawati to review state boundaries, have not, however, goaded the Congress-led government at the Centre to consider setting up the next States Reorganisation Commission, after the last one more than 50 years ago. Indeed, besides the in-depth work that went into re-organising the Indian federation soon after Independence, trying to create a nation state out of a motley bunch of former princely states, feudal enclaves and former-British provinces, the process of state formation has been ad hoc and responding to powerful populism.