One of the concepts you need to know is that South India and North India are actually different.
The great empires established in India in history, such as the Mauryan Dynasty, the Kushan Dynasty, the Gupta Dynasty, the Jiri Empire, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal Dynasty, are all North India with the Gangetic Plain and the Indus Plain as the core. South India, with the Deccan Plateau at its core, did not submit to them for the most part. South India is also divided into many geographical units, each of which has existed independently for a long time. The most obvious example is the language barrier.
Why mention language? Because language is the basis of culture, and cultural identity is the basis of national identity.
The current number of languages in India is 1651, of which 22 are official. You can see the variety of languages.
If the above languages are distinguished according to the language family, they can be roughly divided into four types.
Indo-Aryan language family, mainly distributed in North India with the Indo-Ganges River basin as the core. About 74% of the population is used.
Dravidian language family, mainly distributed in South India with the Deccan Plateau as the core. Tibto-Burman is spoken mainly in the Himalayas in the northern subcontinent and northeastern India. Less than 1% of the population is used.
Austro-Asiatic, mainly in a few parts of the East Indies, is the least widely spoken.
Because of this huge linguistic and cultural difference, India was internally divided when it first became independent. In addition to the 9 provinces/states directly under the central government, there are 558 additional provinces. Every princely state is a country. They account for 1/4 of India's population and 1/3 of India's area.
In order to attribute the princely states to India as much as possible, the Indian government put forward many preferential conditions and made many compromises to the princes of these princely states. In the end, many princely states handed over nothing but military, diplomatic, and communications.
As soon as India stabilized after independence, the Indian government began to carry out certain political suppression of these princely states. The three princely states of Hyderabad, Junag and Kashmir are relatively large and special, and remain unmoved. The remaining 555 princely states were replanned. The 278 princely states formed 5 princely states union, 216 princely states were distributed to neighboring provinces, and 61 princely states were directly administered by the central government.
This kind of repression is most obvious in language. In order to reduce political disagreement caused by language differences, Nehru referred to the Soviet Union's language and ethnic policy in the 1920s, believing that India should not be divided into ethnic groups, but into language families. Therefore, it advocates the establishment of some language states in places where linguistic and cultural differences are great. This is the rudiment of India's central respect for local history and culture.
However , the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 left Nehru with a bad impression that the establishment of language states would promote regional separatism and weaken the unity of India, so he resisted the idea of establishing language states and instead advocated " one country , one nation , one language " .
Therefore, when the Indian Constitution was enacted in 1950, it was stipulated that English was the official language and Hindi was the mother tongue.
So the problem is, the area where Hindi is spoken is limited to North India, and the population spoken by India is only 30%, which is not representative at all. In regions such as South India, where the local language has been spoken for thousands of years, how can it be changed to Hindi?
Therefore, from the very beginning of Nehru's idea, it inevitably carried a tendency towards "Great Hinduism", which quickly aroused the resentment of other princely states.
In the Telugu-speaking region of Madras in South India, the local Andaro people strongly advocate the establishment of a Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh there. In 1952, Potti Sriramulu, a social activist who had participated in the Salt March, died on a hunger strike for the rights of the language state, which led to a large number of violent incidents against the government across the country. Finally, in August 1953, Nehru had to retreat and passed a resolution establishing Andhra Pradesh.
Good. Once Nehru opened the opening, it was endless. People from other linguistic communities, such as Tamils, Sikhs, Naga, etc., also asked Nehru's Congress Party to establish their own language state. Later, the administrative divisions of India were revised several times, mainly to add language states. In addition to these linguistic states, India has a large number of sub-autonomous administrative regions.
If we compare China with an analogy, these language states in India are equivalent to several of our autonomous regions, but the administrative power of the language states is much greater than that of our autonomous regions.
The simplest example is that the CPI(M) has long been in power in the two major states of Kerala and West Bengal.
To paraphrase China's experience, there are huge differences between local and local areas.
In China, that is, two systems.
But unlike the differences that have only accumulated in modern history in China, India is a difference accumulated over thousands of years.
The official language of Kerala is Malayalam, and the official language of West Bengali is Bengali, plus these two places were the first to arrive by Western colonialists and the first to develop capitalism, and they themselves have a strong working class base. Therefore, if the locals choose a party that is different from the Congress party, they must choose a partyo that can represent local interests
The split of the CPI can also reflect this characteristic. Mumbai is the stronghold of the Congress Party, and Danji advocates cooperation with the Congress Party and a unity line. Kolkata is one of the strongholds of the PKI, and Sundaraya advocates continuing the line of class struggle. So the former continued to use the CPI, and the latter was renamed the CPI (MA). Later, some people in the CPI(M) believed that the class struggle was still confined to the system and was not sufficiently reformed, so they formed a separate CPI (Marxist-Leninist). Influenced by the peasant uprising, some people even adhered to the idea of agrarian revolution and founded the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. The reason why they are more radical than the other is because there are huge differences in India, and the interests of various places and groups are different. For example, the CPI goes to the top, the CPI (M) goes to the grassroots level, and the CPI (Maoist) takes the armed division of the countryside. There are different interest demands, naturally there are different parties.
What can the Indian government do when confronted with these parties with completely different ideas from the Congress Party? Repression? No way. To suppress them is to suppress local interests, and the more they suppress, the more serious the centrifugal tendency. You can only acquiesce and compromise. So in India there is a situation in which the PKI is in charge of the local (Amazing). As I said above, language is the basis of culture, and cultural identity is the basis of national identity. When the country faces difficulties, when the social economy deteriorates, the target of resentment is not this general environment, but the contradictions accumulated by history. For example, the 1929 crisis, which led to the rise of the Nazis to power, intensified traditional anti-Semitism in Germany, and the 2008 crisis, which led to the rise of Trump, intensified the anti-immigrant tradition in the United States. There is an old Chinese saying that if the country is in trouble, X will be chaotic, and this is also true. When it comes to India, religious contradictions and cultural conflicts will intensify, and the embodiment of contradictions will be the struggle between the central and local governments in India.
Now India's national situation is still on the rise, and separatism in Punjab, Kashmir and the northeast has emerged. When his national power declines, the big problem comes, and every language state will be a breeding ground for potential separatism.
If we apply the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union and rank the separatist forces in these places, I think that the northeastern region and Kashmir are likely to be the first places in India to collapse in the future. Secondly, Punjab, the state has a deep grudge against Hinduism and Muhammadism. Then there will be the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, which have strong indigenous cultural ideas and will not be the first independent regions, but will determine the future direction of India. Then there are Kerala and West Bengal, which are traditionally ruled by the PKI, plus ideological conflicts. Finally, there are other language states.