The people of Uttar Pradesh may treasure the return gift long after the birthday party is over. Surrounded by buntings and courtier bureaucrats as she turned 52, Chief Minister Mayawati made what sounded like a promise. Her government was ready to pass a resolution in Vidhan Sabha seeking division of the state into three parts, she said, if the Centre was willing. With the Congress-led government at the Centre recently toying with the proposal of setting up a Second States Reorganisation Commission, the break-up of UP is an idea whose time has come. It has taken far too long already.

It can be discussed whether the division Mayawati has proposed — the often talked about slicing of the state into Poorvanchal, Harit Pradesh and Bundelkhand — is the most viable. But that the division itself will be good for UP is surely beyond debate. The argument for small states is generally a potent one in a democracy — they bring government closer to the people, they shorten and tighten the lines of accountability. In smaller states, sub-regional disparities are more likely to be addressed, and citizens may express more homogeneous preferences, leading to a greater sense of common purpose. Uttar Pradesh must be broken up into smaller pieces for all those reasons — and more. Most of all, UP needs to be divided into smaller states because that may be the only way to shake up its politics that has congealed into inefficient habits and unrepresentative routines. While politics has been turning and changing in several states — even Bihar has recently witnessed a change of both government and governance — it remains the same in UP. In large part this is because political parties have carved out the state into separate fiefs and frozen vote banks. The players’ ability to strike bargains with each other to form the government has been elevated into the primary political skill. Of course, Mayawati broke the trend of fragmented mandates in the last election. She must now harness the BSP’s majority to structurally transform the politics of her state in lasting ways.

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