against outside entities, which provided the required contingent solidarity
around the national idea, and because much of it was conducted outside
of public scrutiny. Generally, the unresolved problems of defining an
Indian nation were usually avoided by the conventional conflation of the
state and the nation – common to all international (which, when one
thinks about it, actually means inter-state) as well as national (which
actually means intra-state) discourses. In the Indian case, however, it was
impossible to wish away the continuing problems of ‘nation-building’;
India was a problematic entity. And it is possible to see in retrospect that
the Nehruvian state preferred to defer problematic questions of identity
and difference rather than highlight them – because they did not lend
themselves to easy resolutions.
Paradigmatic ‘nations’ have often been able to base their nationalisms
on a common language. According to the CPI-adopted position, India,
as a multinational state and a federation, would have nothing to lose by
acknowledging the rights of linguistic ‘nationalities’ to self-determination
of sorts, within an Indian union. However, if the official view was that
India was composed of one nationality (and that Pakistan was an aberrant
division of one nation into two), to raise the possibility of reorganisation
of boundaries of states was a delicate one. Nehru was uneasy about this
question. He preferred, if he could, to defer a problem which stressed
particularisms rather than the collective unity of India. The first con-
cession was made in 1953, when the state of Andhra Pradesh was created
from the Telugu-speaking areas of Madras and Hyderabad; in effect a
success for the CPI, which had raised the question during the Telengana
struggle and had thereafter been able to draw on the movement’s
momentum in electoral terms, showing its strength in these areas in the
state elections of 1951–2.
Once accepted in principle, the process had to continue. From 1953 to
1955, a States Reorganisation Commission met to decide principles of
the redrawing of boundaries, and the 1956 States Reorganisation Act
enabled boundaries to be redrawn. Nehru’s own impatience with what
he contemptuously referred to as ‘provincialism’ remained. Although he
was willing to acknowledge that there might be groups within a country
that felt the need to organise separately against exploitation or perceived
exploitation, as someone sceptical of strong forms of nationalism, he was
even less sympathetic to smaller fragmentary identities. ‘While sectarian
interests eat at the roots of our national unity,’ he declared somewhat
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 207