If all the various groups that claim to be disadvantaged in one way or another are totted up, they account for 76 percent of the population. The so called majority Hindi speaking uppercase Hind us who provide the ruling class are, in fact, a substantial minority.
As the present rumblings and riots among Marathi speaking communities outside Maharashtra prove, language can strike a powerful dissonance even among Hind us. When the Maharashtra Government rejected a 1956 award giving the disputed district to neighboring Karnataka (Mysore) whose people speak Kannada, New Del hi set up a commission to investigate rival claims. Ten years later, the commission confirmed the interstate boundary but proposed the exchange of certain villages, This, too, was unacceptable to Maharashtra whose present Congress Chief Minister has no qualms, like his predecessors, about defying the Congress Prime Minister in Delhi on a matter touching clan solidarity.
The violent protests staged by various Marathi organizations in the last few weeks to demand a site of Karnataka territory shows how Potent regional passions can be, Having opened a particularly dangerous Pandora’s Box, the Gandhi Government seems helplessly tunable to control the fierce local chauvinisms that threaten to wreck Indian cohesiveness.
Rajiv Gandhi, it must be admitted, is the inheritor of some destabilizing precedents. Exactly 30 years ago, his grandfather, Nehru, accepted the principle that a homogenous linguistic group is entitled toast ate of its own. As a result of that decision, the map of India was redrawn to depict half a dozen new states. Secondly, the Indian Constitution was revised explicitly to empower the Government to alter state boundaries to create new states justifying todays Gork haland argument that further new units were obviously anticipated, These precedents, coupled with the Prime Ministers surrender to force majeure in Assam and elsewhere make present demands seem irresistible. If Gandhi does not give in to them, he runs the risk of facing further bloody protests and spreading lawlessness. If he does, he will weaken the consciousness of a common Indian citizenship and indirectly also, perhaps give a fillip to separatism.
It is a cruel dilemma for a leader with little experience, relying only on friends of similar backgrounds and on computers from the United States, India’s present problems are of a kind to which sophisticated technology offers no answers.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 8, 1986
