The argument about Telangana does Indians a service: it reminds us that the business of politics is reconciling the tidy first principles of liberal democracy with the untidy realities of a diverse subcontinent. The issue of state formation forces us to think of the forest (the logic of political community), instead of barking up individual trees (river waters, reservations and other assorted resentments). It also, confusingly, reminds us that there is no single rationale for virtuous statehood: demands for new states are driven by local and historical contexts that are hard to generalize into axiomatic wisdom.

The debate about Telangana has raised questions about linguistic states. It has been generally accepted for several decades now that the reorganization of India’s provincial boundaries on linguistic lines was historically inevitable given the strength of feeling amongst Telugu and Marathi speakers during the early years of the republic. Linguistic states were also judged to have been broadly successful.

It is worth remembering that the opposition to linguistic states at the time was led by distinguished men from across the political spectrum. We know that Jawaharlal Nehru was instinctively hostile to the idea: for him, language was nearly as parochial a category as religion or caste when it came to drawing boundaries around a political community. K.M. Munshi, speaking as a Gujarati, argued against the assimilation of Bombay into the proposed state of Maharashtra, saying that “the political ambition of a linguistic group can only be satisfied by the exclusion and discrimination of other linguistic groups within the area. No safeguards and no fundamental rights can save them from the subtle psychological exclusion which linguism implies.”

As India’s internal boundaries have evolved over the years, the consensual view has been that Nehru’s and Munshi’s fears weren’t borne out. The bullying chauvinism of nativist politicians like Bal Thackeray in Maharashtra and Vatal Nagaraj in Karnataka, and their angst about the domination of Bombay and Bangalore by ‘outsiders’, has been condemned as a deplorable but relatively minor side effect of what has otherwise been a successful experiment in political map-making.

Does the proposed creation of Telangana undo that judgment? After all, the death of Potti Sriramulu in 1952 was the event that set the linguistic state juggernaut in motion and forced Nehru’s hand. If Sriramulu’s Andhra Pradesh is now bifurcated, if an overwhelmingly Telugu-speaking state (three-fourths of the population of the proposed Telangana state is Telugu-speaking) is to be divided, does this mean that linguistic reorganization was a detour not a destination, a halfway house to something else?

It can be argued that Telangana’s separation from Andhra Pradesh isn’t a historical departure given the fact that three Hindi-speaking states have been partitioned in the recent past: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. In this perspective, Telangana is a late example of an established trend: the secession from large states of regions that feel materially deprived or neglected.

This is true but Telangana’s secession has a special resonance because the linguistic reorganization of states was substantially a peninsular project. India’s Hindi-speaking population had always been dispersed in several states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, the Central Provinces and so on; so its further subdivision into three more wasn’t particularly significant. On the other hand, the campaigns for a Tamil nadu or a Telegu desam, were acts of political assertion: the ideological justification for these states and their boundaries was the idea that language was a kind of political superglue.

Does Telangana de-legitimize this foundational idea? Does it presage a political future of chronic fission where the idea of India is dissolved into scores of statelets, created not on the basis of a coherent principle, but contingent grievances and the need to control and dispense the political patronage that statehood brings?

It is worth reading B.R. Ambedkar’s views on linguistic states. When he first addressed the question in 1948, in a statement submitted to the Linguistic Provinces Commission, he not only favoured the establishment of linguistic states (because he felt they supplied the homogeneity necessary for harmonious, democratic governance), he was emphatic that as far as geography permitted, everyone who spoke a particular language should be consolidated into a single state.

“When it is decided to create a Linguistic Province, I am definitely of the opinion that all areas which are contiguous and which speak the same language should be forced to come into it. There should be no room for choice or for self-determination. Every attempt must be made to create larger provincial units. Smaller provincial units will be a perpetual burden in normal times and a source of weakness in an emergency. Such a situation must be avoided. That is why I insist that all parts of Maharashtra should be merged together in a single province.”

On this view, the creation of Telangana amounts to political regression. But Ambedkar’s views on linguistic states evolved. He remained committed to the principle that states should be organized around a single language, but his ideas on how this principle should be realized, changed. In his short book on the question, Thoughts on Linguistic States, published in 1955, seven years after his statement to the Linguistic Provinces Commission, he summarized the matter with his characteristic lucidity and sharpness.

“What does a linguistic State mean?” he asked. “It can mean one of two things. It can mean that all people speaking one language must be brought under the jurisdiction of one State. It can also mean that people speaking one language may be grouped under many States provided each State has under its jurisdiction people who are speaking one language. Which is the correct interpretation?”

His answer was emphatic: “…one language, one State can never be a categorical imperative. In fact one State, one language should be the rule. And therefore people forming one language can divide themselves into many States.” From being a champion of a unified Maharashtra, Ambedkar in 1955 proposed the division of Maharashtra into four states.

Shobhaa De will be pleased to know that her tweeted proposal for separate statehood for Bombay had been endorsed nearly sixty years ago by Ambedkar. Ambedkar was keenly aware of earlier attempts to detach Bombay from Maharashtra by the city’s non-Marathi-speaking elites and wanted to distance himself from their ilk, so he proposed to rename Bombay as Maharashtra City State to reassure Maharashtrians of their ownership of the city.

Presciently, Ambedkar argued for the division of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh into smaller provinces. His reasons were clear: not only were these provinces administratively unwieldy, their size gave them enormous influence over the Central government. They needed to be literally cut down to size to equalize the relationship of states with the Centre. An even more important reason for large linguistic states to be divided into smaller ones was that Ambedkar believed that vulnerable minorities were better off in small states.

“The larger the State the smaller the proportion of the minority to the majority. To give one illustration — if Mahavidarbha remained separate, the proportion of Hindus to Muslims would be four to one. In the United Maharashtra, the proportion will be fourteen to one. The same would be the case of the Untouchables. A small stone of a consolidated majority placed on the chest of the minority may be borne. But the weight of a huge mountain it cannot bear. It will crush the minorities. Therefore the creation of smaller States is a safeguard to the minorities.”

From this distance of nearly sixty years, Thoughts on Linguistic States has worn remarkably well. Ambedkar wasn’t always on the right side of history: his insistence that the official language of the Centre, Hindi, should be the official language of every linguistic state, was disregarded without the dire consequences he had predicted. On the other hand, with the creation of Telangana, Ambedkar’s preference for more than one state organized around the same language is about to become a reality in peninsular India.

In north India, Mayavati’s proposal that Uttar Pradesh be divided into four small provinces, echoes Ambedkar’s prescription that Uttar Pradesh be cut up into three states, while Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh make his detailed suggestions for the division of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh seem positively prescient.

But we should read Ambedkar not for his infallibility — we have seen from his work that his own thinking on this issue evolved — or his prescience, but to remind ourselves how seriously our founding fathers engaged with questions of nationalism, sub-nationalism, statehood and political community. To see Ambedkar lay out the arguments for and against linguistic states, to read his sharp but civil refutations of what he considered to be an error, is to be privy to the workings of political Reason. He sets out his premises, makes his arguments and itemizes his conclusions. You don’t have to agree with him, but he makes rational disagreement possible.

Contrast this with the United Progressive Alliance’s wretched, ad hoc, unprincipled ‘resolution’ of the Telangana question. Instead of appointing a new states reorganization committee at the beginning of its second term in office, to systematically investigate the question of statehood for Telangana, Vidarbha, Gorkhaland and Bodoland, we have the spectacle of the UPA promising Telangana, reneging on that promise, procrastinating and then rolling the dice before the elections like a bankrupt hoping to be bailed out by a miracle.

It is one thing to accept that all large decisions in a democratic State are subject to the press of events and political calculation, quite another to behave as if last-minute opportunism is a substitute for policy. The matter of Telangana was an invitation to think about the Union in a serious way: it is too bad that our political masters chose to turn it down.