State-breaking is not nation making (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level:
Mains level: Re-organisations of Indian states

Context

• In India most linguistic and ethnic groups aspire for a State of their own.
• Militants have taken up arms against the government and against other groups to achieve this particular objective.
• The abrogation of Article 370 guaranteed by the Constitution, and the downgrading of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, are being hailed and celebrated.
• It is surprising that the Telangana Government which secured its State through popular mobilisation, voted for a Bill that dismembered Jammu and Kashmir.

Issue of co-existence

• This lesson was hammered into political consciousness by events that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
• Countries melted away and a number of new States emerged out of the debris of old ones often through processes of civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
• As the world saw a rush of State-breaking and State-making, a new lease of life was infused into dormant separatist movements.
• The spate of ethnic cleansing and genocide has prompted scholars to raise the question: how can we ensure that people who speak different languages, worship different gods, and follow different belief systems coexist in a plural society?

Kernel of identity

• On balance, scholars agreed that federalism is the best answer to the question of co-existence. Federalism has since long been offered as an antidote to the centralisation of power, which results in a democratic deficit in large and multicultural societies.
• Decentralisation and regional autonomy ensure responsive governance, fiscal prudence and efficiency as well as popular participation.
• But in the 1990s, scholars realised that individuals do not only seek economic benefits.
• Individuals need to have an identity; they need community whether that of language, or religion, or memory, or shared traditions.

Regional autonomy

• The homogenising impulse of the nation state generates resistance. These are political wars; they cannot be resolved by military means.
• The only way to stem, to ward off disorder and the innumerable tragedies mayhem spawns is to strengthen federalism.
• A decentralised political system enables participation. It also protects minority identities. This was the precise logic that governed the linguistic reorganisation of States in India in the 1950s.
• This was the precise logic that gave to Jammu and Kashmir, along with other constituent States of the Indian federal system, regional autonomy.

Conclusion

• Mature democracies do not steamroller diversity or oppress minorities.
• They understand that diverse cultures expand and enrich our grasp of the complexities, and the dilemmas of the human condition.
• A monochromatic society is, by definition, soulless and bare. Stripped of the excitement of learning new languages, acquaintance with new values, familiarity with new cuisines, literature, music, art, sculpture, and ways of conceiving the world, life becomes dull. Life in a plural society promises adventure.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) Dixon Plan of 1950, recently seen in news, is related to:
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
a) Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
b) Resolution on the Kashmir dispute.
c) Peacefully divide and claim colonial land in Africa.
d) An American initiative passed in 1948 to aid Western Europe.

Correct Answer: B
Mains Questions:
Q.1) Do you think in Jammu and Kashmir demotion, every code, principle and constitutional sanction protecting federalism has been violated?