The Constitution of India describes our country as a Union of States, and the Seventh Schedule lays down a clear division of powers and responsibilities. This, in turn, charts out how a state works and what it ought to do. However, Article 2, which is supposed to define what a state is, remains vague—deliberately or otherwise. Article 2 merely says that “Parliament may by law admit into the Union, or establish, new States on such terms and conditions as it thinks fit."

All politics boils down to a combination of identity and economics. Identity is what one is, while economics is a part of what one does. Felicity in understanding what one does accompanied by an inability to define what one is, is a characteristic of a complex system. Such systems are widely recognised in science. Our country Bhārat is a textbook example of a complex system. The problem with our Constitution is that it attempts to define what a state is through what it does.

Clause 14, Chapter I, Part I of the States Reorganisation Committee Report of 1955 summarises the position pithily: “The existing structure of the States [sic] of the Indian Union is partly the result of accident and the circumstances attending the growth of the British power in India and partly a by-product of the historic process of the integration of former Indian States. The division of India during the British period into British provinces and Indian States was itself fortuitous and had no basis in Indian history."

Language becoming the primary determinant of identity is a recent phenomenon in our hoary civilisational history. It is fully artificial. The partition of Bengal in 1905, and its subsequent reunification in 1911 was also accompanied by the creation of the linguistic provinces of Orissa and Assam. The separation of a Telugu speaking state from the erstwhile Madras Presidency in 1953, and the appearance of Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati speaking states thereafter, established the pattern. Tamil Nadu defaulted into being a linguistic state because of the formation of Andhra Pradesh.

Ironically, the first linguistic state formed in independent India, namely Andhra Pradesh, was divided in 2014 into two Telugu speaking states (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana) demonstrating the hollowness of the linguistic state idea in a modern forward-looking country. Historically, Telugu was always the court language and the language of the higher classes in most parts of South India for at least 1000 years right down till 1947. It enjoyed a status equal to that of Sanskrit in the fine arts. Inscriptions in Telugu are........

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