ABSTRACT
Creation of a new state is an exceptional event. Telangana succeeded in becoming India’s newest state on June 2, 2014, after several decades of struggle. While India has a history of creating and merging states, it is usually done with consensus among the states concerned; in the case of Telangana, no such consensus could be reached. Further, Global and national investors were not in favor of Telangana as they had invested in lands in and around the capital Hyderabad. Many theorists of globalization since the early 1990s have emphasized on the interaction between global and local to the detriment of the nation-state. This book argues that far from declining in significance, nationalism encompasses both hegemonic and counterhegemonic, mediatized processes of power struggle, processes that draw increasingly from resources that are both internal and external to geographic domains of conflict, and in a manner that repatterns power relations at the local, national, regional and global levels. Various counterhegemonic uprisings also lay claim to discourses of nationalism, locally. This chapter introduces history of Telangana movement and its quest for statehood, arguing that globalization provided the context for revival of the demand.
