The response of the Congress and the BJP to the unfolding political scenario in Uttar Pradesh once again reveals the sheer intellectual and moral vacuity of our two main political parties. They are quite willing to engage in hypocritical contortions and set dangerous constitutional precedents to achieve the short-term goal of getting rid of Mulayam Singh Yadav. But neither political party is willing to be politically imaginative and ask a more fundamental question: what are the reforms needed to bring about the kind of radical change that politics in UP requires?

The answer to this question is complex. But most observers would agree that one reform essential for the well-being of the state’s citizens is the further break-up of the state into at least three more states. Whether this should be along the lines of the often discussed divisions of Harit Pradesh, Purvanchal and Bundelkhand can be debated. But the desirability of breaking up the state ought to be self-evident. Amitabh Bachchan’s latest advertisement may mushily try to project the identity of UP. But this behemoth of a 170 million citizens makes little sense. There is no administrative rationale, no economic justification, no compelling political logic, and not even any linguistic or cultural framework for holding the state together. Rather than uniting on short-sighted constitutional shenanigans, the Congress and the BJP would display far more political innovation if they united on making the break-up of UP possible.

No one argues that smaller states will be a panacea for all ills, or even that some states will not flounder. But there is a case to be made for India having more states — a number possibly closer to fifty. Some of the arguments for smaller states apply across the board generally: in large states there are often too many sub-regional disparities that get glossed over by treating the state as a sacrosanct unit. There is the possibility that citizens of smaller states have more homogeneous preferences that make for more effective collective action. The standard arguments that more states might mean more barriers for creating an integrated market are less compelling, given the overall harmonisation between the policies of states on issues like taxation that is already under way.

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