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.

Indeed, one could argue that in the case of a mega state like UP, part of the difficulty is that this vast area has not had the benefit of competition among administrative jurisdictions. India has actually done reasonably well after most waves of state reorganisation. Smaller states like Himachal, Haryana and Uttaranchal have done reasonably well. The exception to this is the Northeast, but that is largely a consequence of aligning ethnicity with territoriality rather than the fact that they are small states. There may be no knock-down argument that can prove that small states within a federal polity will always be better, but on balance smaller states are more desirable than bigger ones.

In the case of UP, these arguments become even more compelling. India’s future requires that the current equilibrium of UP politics be drastically shaken up. The current equilibrium is a trap in two ways. The first is ideological. There is arguably no other state whose politics is in such a time warp: the issues of politics and the modalities of mobilising voters have remained the same for close to two decades. Even in benighted Bihar, there is at least something of aspirational change. But even if there is a change in government in UP, it is difficult to imagine such a parallel shift taking place. The second trap is structural. All parties are more or less stuck in their core social base, and are competing for that marginal crossover vote that can catapult them into power. But in a large state, heterogeneous preferences and their prospects of success depend less on taking voter preference seriously than on complicated alliance arithmetic. Citizens are disempowered because in a larger state they are also less likely to vote their true preferences; they have to trade off the costs of doing that versus electing representatives who are good at these cross-state bargains. The premium is not on which candidate you would like; it is on which candidate is more likely to succeed in the tough politics of negotiation over power.

It is difficult to predict what exactly the political consequences of trifurcating UP would be. But there is good reason to believe that post-reorganisation patterns will not simply reproduce current political alignments. That is one reason that the national parties ought to be promoting the break-up of UP.

Politics in UP is unwieldy enough. But the sheer size of the state makes everything that happens there a high-stakes game. If nothing else, breaking up UP will ensure that it does not cast such a long shadow on national politics. But, more importantly, it will ensure that competition for ruling the state does not become a winner-takes-all affair. With three instead of one prize to compete over, political parties will begin to re-think their positions and the constituencies they should cultivate. There is good reason to think that the resulting politics will be less frenzied, more representative, more diverse, possibly more accommodative and more manageable than the current configuration. One might argue that Jharkhand does not give much cause for optimism on this score. But at the very least, the break-up will ensure that the entire region is not held back because of one state government. Although we need more research into how reorganisation of states transforms voter preferences, there is good reason to think that such a move will transform voter preferences.

The political puzzle is this. A party like the Congress has nothing to lose in the state. Why cannot it think out of the box and at least put this issue on the agenda? To use a paradoxical formulation: the emancipation of the citizens of UP depends upon the political abolition of the state of UP. And in campaigning for such a break-up the national parties might not only transform politics in UP, they might also overcome their own political ossification. And it would be wonderful if the Congress and the BJP came together on a platform for the structural transformation of the state, rather than the misguided use of Article 356.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi