(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Linguistic Affiliation as an Organizing Principle
Language, formerly of relatively little political impor-
tance, has since 1947 emerged as a potent political
force in Hindu-majority areas despite the lingering
role of religion as an aspect of ethnicity in postparti-
tion. As a matter of organizational convenience, the
Congress Party, beginning with Bihar in 1908, began
to organize itself into linguistic provinces, even
though most of the provinces of British India and sev-
eral of the larger princely states were multilingual
entities. It was not until 1920, however, that the Con-
gress Party established linguistic units throughout
British India and made the creation of linguistic
administrative provinces a plank in its platform for
political reform. As Congress saw it, the arbitrariness
of the political map that resulted from the unplanned
history of British territorial acquisition in India was an
affront to the natural aspirations of>India’s major lin-
guistic groups. In any event, the call for linguistic
provinces was overshadowed as an issue by the more
inclusive agenda of Gandhi’s noncooperation move-
ment. Conceivably, an unstated motive in the Con-
gress Party’s call for linguistic provinces was to divert
popular attention away from communally based poli-
tlCS. :
The first postindependence demand for a linguistic
state came from Telugu speakers, the largest among
several major minorities in the then Tamil-dominated
state of Madras, The demands persisted, and Congress
conceded by establishing the new Telugu-speaking
state of Andhra in 1954. This opened the floodgates to
calls for additional states based on linguistic criteria.
The govemment then established a States Reorganiza-
tion Commission to study the problem, and ultimately
the States Reorganization Act of 1956 led to a radical
redrawing of the political map. The 1956 Act, how-
ever, failed to divide the essentially bilingual state of
Bombay and the putatively bilingual state of Punjab.
These intentional departures from the new linguistic
state nomts were short lived. Bombay was partitioned
in 1960 to form the Marathi-speaking state of'Maha-
rashtra and the Gujarati-speaking state of Gujarat. In
1966, Punjab was also partitioned, allegedly on a lin-
guistic basis, but in actuality on communal grounds;
when the govemment acceded to the Sikh demands
for a reconfigured Punjab, the reduced area of-the new
state was one in which Sikhs became an absolute
majority. Figure ll reveals the extensive changes
wrought by linguistic reorganization over the period
1951-72.
The government’s conciliatory attitude in regard to
linguistic reorganization did not mollify linguistic
groups sufficiently to guarantee their loyalty to the
Union govemment. Within Madras, in particular, a
demand arose for an independent Dravidian nation——
sometimes dubbed “Dravidistan”——to comprise the
four new linguistic states in which Dravidian lan-
guages were spoken. As matters transpired, the three
other Dravidian states of South India showed rela-
tively little enthusiasm for a Tamil-led Dravidian
nation, and the movement lost its momentum. But one
lasting outcome was the rise to power of the Uravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a Tamilian ethnic party
established in 1949. Alone or at the head of*a multi-
party coalition, the DMK has ruled Madras, or Tamil
Nadu as it was renamed in 1969, for all but six years
since it first came to power in 1967. Arguably, the pru-
dent willingness of the Congress Party to allow ethni-
cally minded Tamil politicians to enjoy the rewards of
power did as much as the lack of separatist ardor in
neighboring Dravidian states to blunt secessionist
demands. Had the movement succeeded, it would
almost certainly have led to the Balkanization of
India.
Demands for reorganizing the political map of inde-
pendent India were not all rooted in linguistic con-
sciousness. Several newly created linguistic states
contained regions that lagged notably behind others in
levels of economic and social development. As a rule,
areas that had formed a part of British India were gen-
erally more advanced than those previously ruled by
the less progressive princes, such‘ as the Nizam of
Hyderabad. Regions lagging behind the political core
areas of the states to which they were joined soon
sensed that the state was not doing enough to rectify
the ill-effects of past neglect. This, in turn, led to sev-
eral demands for separation, fueled by local politi-
cians who sought to harness local discontent as the
vehicle for furthering their own political ambitions. To
what extent those politicians and their followers were
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268