Federation-Building Framework for Addressing Autonomy Movements in India

India’s political map looks settled today, but the lines that define its states were drawn through decades of negotiation, protest, and at times, armed conflict. Movements demanding autonomy in Punjab, the North-East, and Jammu and Kashmir have repeatedly forced a fundamental question: how does a country of immense linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity stay together without crushing the very identities that make up its parts? The federation-building framework offers one of the most thoughtful answers to that question. Articulated most prominently by scholars like Sanjib Baruah, it challenges the conventional way we think about national unity and asks us to take regional aspirations seriously rather than treat them as obstacles to overcome.

The problem with the nation-building lens 🔗

For decades, the dominant way of studying state politics relied on what is called the nation-building framework. This perspective, rooted in modernist theory, treats the consolidation of a single national identity as the central task of a post-colonial state. From this viewpoint, the goal is to integrate diverse populations into one cohesive nation, often by encouraging a common language, a shared civic culture, and loyalty to central institutions.

The trouble is that this lens tends to view regional and ethnic assertions as problems to be managed or suppressed. Movements for greater autonomy get labelled as threats to integrity, and the aspirations of constituent states are dismissed as parochial or even dangerous. The framers of the Indian Constitution themselves were cautious here: scholars have noted that central elites deliberately avoided creating linguistically homogenous federal subunits in the early years, fearing they would generate subnational political identities that might one day threaten territorial unity.

Baruah’s critique is that this approach gets the relationship backwards. Studying a region like the North-East, he argues, constantly exposes the problematic nature of the nation-state as a political institution. Earlier political formations did not insist that political boundaries match cultural or ethnic ones. Only systems that genuinely decentralise authority can accommodate the kind of layered diversity that places like the North-East contain. When the centre instead pushes for homogeneity and tighter control, it does not resolve conflict; it manufactures new conflict.

What the federation-building framework actually argues 🔗

The federation-building framework flips the analytical priority. Instead of asking how the state can mould diverse groups into one nation, it asks how a genuine federation can be built that respects the distinct identities of its parts while still binding them together.

At its heart, this framework treats sub-nationalism not as a pathology but as a legitimate and even permanent feature of Indian politics. Baruah himself has pointed out a simple but powerful truth: our identities as Bengali, Assamese, or Punjabi are centuries old, while our shared identity as Indian is comparatively recent. From this angle, regionalism is not a deviation waiting to be corrected but a natural reality that any durable political arrangement must work with.

Sub-nationalism and national identity as partners 🔗

A key insight of the framework is that regional and national identities need not be in opposition. They can be mutually reinforcing. India’s freedom struggle itself was, in many ways, an aggregation of regional and sub-national identities, and the national movement reflected the idea that regional identities do not counterpose national identities but go hand in hand. To be Tamil or Punjabi has never meant being any less Indian.

This is why scholars describe Indian federalism less as a fixed structure and more as a continuous “holding operation.” Unlike federations formed by states voluntarily coming together, India’s model was designed to hold an extraordinarily diverse country together through shared rule and constitutional accommodation. Regions do not simply exist within the country; they constitute it. The federation-building framework asks us to study this relationship as one between a nation and its constituent nations, an issue that goes well beyond the narrow questions of centre-state finance or electoral coalitions.

Why this matters for studying autonomy movements 🔗

The real strength of the framework appears when we apply it to actual movements. Where the nation-building lens sees insurgency and separatism as failures of integration, the federation-building lens asks a different question: were these aspirations ever genuinely accommodated within the federal structure, or were they treated as security threats from the start?

The North-East: autonomy as both remedy and limit 🔗

Baruah’s home region offers the clearest test case. The Indian state has used a wide toolkit to manage ethnic conflict here, including the Sixth Schedule under Article 244, which allows for autonomous district and regional councils in states like Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram, and a series of special provisions ranging from Article 371-A to 371-J for several North-Eastern states. These are precisely the asymmetric, decentralising devices the framework values.

Yet the record is mixed. Federal devolution has reduced ethnic tension in some cases, but it has not been a universal remedy, as some insurgent outfits continue to claim sovereignty. Some movements, like the Mizo insurgency, were eventually channelled into constitutional politics through accords, while others took an extra-constitutional path. Baruah argues that the deeper problem was the postcolonial state’s tendency to treat the region as a frontier to be secured rather than a society to be heard. The imposition of a special security regime, he contends, produced a persistent sense of alienation that fresh conflict could grow from. His proposed alternative, multilevel citizenship, where a person is a citizen both of India and of a state, is itself a deeply federal idea.

Punjab: a federal demand turned into a security crisis 🔗

Punjab shows what can happen when autonomy demands are not met within the federal framework. The earlier Punjabi Suba movement sought a Punjabi-speaking state and was ultimately accommodated in 1966 with the reorganisation of Punjab, Haryana, and Chandigarh. This was federation-building in action: a linguistic-cultural demand resolved through restructuring.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 pushed further. Often misremembered only as a separatist document, its core was actually a demand to recast the Constitution on stronger federal lines. It sought to limit the central government’s role to defence, foreign relations, currency, and communications, while explicitly rejecting secession. The Shiromani Akali Dal had in fact been arguing for greater state autonomy since its 1968 Batala Conference, demanding that the Constitution be corrected on a proper federal basis so the country could function smoothly. When these federal demands went unaddressed through the 1970s and early 1980s, the space opened for extremist elements to reframe an autonomy agenda as a separatist one, with the tragic violence of the Punjab insurgency following.

Jammu and Kashmir: asymmetry under strain 🔗

Jammu and Kashmir was, for decades, the most striking example of asymmetric federalism in India. Article 370 granted the state a special autonomous status, and the Constitution as a whole gives varying degrees of autonomy to different units. Interestingly, the Akali Dal’s early demands explicitly invoked Article 370 as a model, seeking for Punjab a special status along the lines already granted to Kashmir.

The federation-building framework reads the Kashmir question as fundamentally about whether that asymmetric arrangement was honoured in practice or steadily eroded. The provision’s autonomy guarantees were, over the years, substantially hollowed out, and its eventual abrogation in 2019 marked a decisive shift toward centralisation, the very trend Baruah warns generates new conflict rather than resolving old ones.

Centralisation and the framework’s warning 🔗

What ties these cases together is a single dynamic the framework keeps spotlighting. The Constitution gave the centre significant powers, but the centre’s authority over the states grew far beyond its original constitutional sanction, and these centralising tendencies fuelled the politics of regionalism across the country. For a lasting resolution, scholars working in this tradition argue for a federal state genuinely sensitive to the identities and aspirations of the many groups within it.

This concern is not merely historical. Observers note that tensions from subnational, identity-based politics, long kept at bay by a carefully crafted federal settlement, are regaining political salience in states with strong linguistic and cultural pride. The federation-building framework suggests that the answer is not to tighten central control further, but to deepen the federal bargain.

How the framework reshapes the study of state politics 🔗

Adopting this framework changes the questions a student of state politics asks. Rather than measuring how successfully regions have been absorbed into a national mainstream, it asks whether the federal structure has given them a real voice. It treats accords, autonomy councils, and special constitutional provisions not as concessions wrung out of a reluctant centre, but as the everyday substance of building a federation.

It also reframes “crisis.” A regional movement, in this view, may signal a crisis of development or accommodation rather than a crisis of nation-building. That distinction matters enormously for policy. If the diagnosis is failed integration, the prescription tends toward more central control. If the diagnosis is failed accommodation, the prescription is more genuine federalism, more dialogue, and more respect for the constituent units that, taken together, actually make up the country.

What do you think? If regional identities in India are older and in some ways more deeply felt than the national identity, should the federal structure be redesigned to give states even greater autonomy, or would that risk weakening the country’s unity? And when an autonomy movement turns violent, how much of the responsibility lies with the movement itself versus a centre that failed to accommodate its earlier, peaceful federal demands?

References

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