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Students celebrate T elangana's statehood in Hyderabad on July 30. (NOAH SEELAM/AFP/Getty Images)
Summary
India is set to inaugurate its 29th state: Telangana will be carved out of the existing southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the highest working body of India's ruling Congress Party decided late July 30 to find the legal means to create the new entity. The success of the Telangana movement for statehood encapsulates the deep-rooted struggles New Delhi faces in trying to preserve and manage a nation riven with internal complexities.
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Analysis
Now that the Congress Party and its allies in the United Progressive Alliance coalition, as well as the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, have endorsed Telangana statehood, the proposal will move to the Andhra Pradesh state assembly, which will be called upon to sort out water and energy distribution as well as pending political issues before the new state can be approved by a simple majority vote in the national parliament. Some Congress Party officials, eager to seize political momentum and in hopes that the move will translate into votes in the 2014 general elections, claim the process can be completed in as little as four to five months, but that is probably too optimistic an estimate. The Indian government has deployed an additional 1,500 paramilitary personnel to the state in anticipation of riots, fearing that clashes will ensue between celebrating pro-Telangana activists and opponents protesting the split of Andhra Pradesh. In addition to the threat of riots, Naxalite
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A History of Scissions
Telangana is poised to join a long list of states that have been created since India's independence in 1947. Before Telangana, the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, in 2000. Goa defined its state boundaries in 1987, while Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in the countrys far-flung northeast grew out of Assam in the same year. Manipur and Tripura earned their statehood in 1972, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh were carved out of Punjab state in 1966 and Bombay state in 1960 was divided along linguistic lines into Maharashtra and Gujarat. There is a much longer list of agitated pockets throughout India that are trying to get on the list for statehood, including but not limited to calls for a Bodoland in Assam, Gorkhaland in West Bengal and Vidarbha in Maharashtra. India's constantly shifting map is no accident. Nation-building can be a messy process, and politicians, activists and militants of various stripes are still grappling with a score of unsettled issues left by India's chaotic transition from the British Raj to an Indian republic in the mid-20th century. Like a cracked window pane, India's multiple river systems cut across the subcontinent and give shape to hundreds of distinct geographic, ethnic, religious and linguistic identities.
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Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the father of the Indian republic, quickly realized that the three-tier division the British Raj used to divide and administer India's governorships and princely states was ill-suited to the new country. In 1953, he launched a commission to figure out how to reorganize the country. Controversial political questions naturally emerged -- whether to redraw states along lines of linguistic and cultural unity, as well as how to preserve geographic continuity and financial viability. Leaders worried about the precedents any action could set in a country that speaks hundreds of languages and dialects and is beset by overlapping boundaries and economic interests. The decided course of action -- as often happens when government commissions confront politically explosive tasks -- was to maintain ambiguity. In the words of the commission that led to the States Reorganization Act of 1956, "it is neither possible nor desirable to reorganize States on the basis of the single test of either language or culture, but that a balanced approach to the whole problem is necessary in the interest of our national unity."
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