Abstract
The States Reorganization Act of 1956, which reformed India's state boundaries primarily along linguistic lines, derailed civic nation creation in postindependence India. Thereafter, regional politicians were given a linguistic community with occasional ethnic congruence as their vote bank. This post-1956 political reality incentivized regional identity formation for regional politicians consolidating political power and eroded the influence of the independence era English-educated secular elite. In addition, the 1956 act made it a strategic rational choice for regional political elites not given their own states, to fight for the formation of new states. The hypothesis demonstrated in this article follows: The States Reorganization Act of 1956 made it the rational choice for regional political and intellectual elites to consolidate power based upon linguistic regional identities, making the central independence era goal of an overarching civic nationalism for the Indian federation impossible.
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