A day after the UPA announced the formation of Telangana, former MP and Congress State unit senior vice president R Anbarasu was the first off the block here to demand the bifurcation of Tamil Nadu. The view, however, doesn’t seem to have gone too well with the State unit bosses.
Anbarasu, a three-time former Congress MP, raised the demand “in a personal capacity” at a press conference on Wednesday.
He noted that during Independence, there were only six large states and six small states in India.
He said the Jawaharlal Nehru administration had decided to break them up into smaller units to enable better administration.
“If they had not been split up, there wouldn’t have been any growth. Even in the case of Tamil Nadu, we had only 13 districts in the beginning, which have now been split into 32 districts on the basis of administrative convenience, economic growth and population,” said Anbarasu.
He further claimed that the number of constituencies in the northern parts of the State was rising, as an increasing number of people from the southern parts were migrating to the north in search of employment and livelihood. “There will come a time when the people will ask for the trifurcation of the State,” Anbarasu said.
He added that a ‘Movement for Bifurcation’ would be launched to bring together like-minded forces on the issue. Anbarasu said a memorandum was under preparation, which would be presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi once completed.
Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) president B S Gnanadesikan, however, insisted that the demand was not on the agenda for the Party’s Sate unit, and that he would examine Anbarasu’s statement before reacting to it.