Politics in India since Independence and aspirations. At other times a concern for region alone may blind us to the larger needs of the nation. Therefore, political conflicts over issues of power of the regions, their rights and their separate existence are common to nations that want to respect diversity while trying to forge and retain unity. Areas of tension In the first chapter you have seen how immediately after Independence our nation had to cope with many difficult issues like Partition, displacement, integration of Princely States, reorganisation of states and so on.
Many observers, both within the country and from outside, had predicted that India as one unified country cannot last long. Soon after Independence, the issue of Jammu and Kashmir came up. It was not only a conflict between India and Pakistan. More than that, it was a question of the political aspirations of the people of Kashmir valley.
Similarly, in some parts of the north-east, there was no consensus about being a part of India. First Nagaland and then Mizoram witnessed strong movements demanding separation from India. In the south, some groups from the Dravid movement briefly toyed with the idea of a separate country. These events were followed by mass agitations in many parts for the formation of linguistic States.
Today’s Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Gujarat were among the regions affected by these agitations. In some parts of southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu, there were protests against making Hindi the official national language of the country. In the north, there were strong pro-Hindi agitations demanding that Hindi be made the official language immediately. From the late 1950s, people speaking the Punjabi language started agitating for a separate State for themselves.
This demand was finally accepted and the States of Punjab and Haryana were created in . Later, the States of Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand were created. Thus the challenge of diversity was met by redrawing the internal boundaries of the country. Yet this did not lead to resolution of all problems and for all times.
In some regions, like Kashmir and Nagaland, the challenge was so complex that it could not be resolved in the first phase of nation-building. Besides, new challenges came up in States like Punjab, Assam and Mizoram. Let us study these cases in some detail. In this process let us also go back to some of the earlier instances of difficulties of nation building.
The successes and failures in these cases are instructive not merely for a study of our past, but also for an understanding of India’s future. Why does the challenge always come from the border States?