Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, author, political scientist, scholar of South Asia with a keen understanding of India’s political landscape, speaks to The Wire’s editor, Seema Chishti.A longtime columnist for The Wire, Jaffrelot discusses the 1951 Jana Sangh manifesto which called for India as a ‘unitary’ state.The Union government has introduced Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which paves the way for a sweeping delimitation exercise and the expansion of the Lok Sabha, a move that has met with fierce criticism from opposition parties.“In this parliament – there is a map – a map of Akhand Bharat – this is their vision of the country and of the region. We need to pay attention to that. I was reading the 1957 Jan Sangh manifesto. I will read out two lines. ‘Jan Sangh will amend the constitution and declare Bharat to be a unitary state. The establishment of a Unitary state will not mean the centralisation of power, Jan Sangh has faith in democracy, to make all people partners in the governance of the country, Jan Sangh will centralise power to the lowest levels of the country.’ What do you do there?,” says Jaffrelot.“You circumvent the states, and you reach out to the local municipal boards, panchayats, they wanted to do something else, they wanted to invent the janpads, the idea is the same. Linguistic states – could not swallow, Jan Sangh was saying in the Organiser, their mouthpiece, ‘We are creating mini nations, we can’t divide India that way.’ This is their deep vision of the nation – as a unitary nation state. If you have anything to revere in the nation it is the rivers, sacred rivers, the mountains, the sacred mountains. The territory of AB, map in Lok Sabha has nothing except rivers and mountains – sacred land – Bharat in the epics, that is their vision. And of course, to make state governments redundant is easier when you shift the balance of power and make Hindi belt that dominant making it impossible to resist – [by] the south and the east,” he adds.States and regional identities have always worried the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and to have so many almost municipality like units, small constituencies, advance the centralisation project, eventually Akhand Bharat, says Jaffrelot.He also speaks about the fact that there will be a fierce political competition in the years ahead and discusses the recent election results in Hungary and how Orban has been overthrown and uprooted, offering another alternative future.Jaffrelot says that incidentally and ironically – this is the same vision that the Pakistan army is cultivating.“They were against the 18th amendment [passed in April 2010, the 18th Constitutional Amendment in Pakistan was a landmark reform. It restored Pakistan’s constitution to its original intent of a decentralised federation of four provinces as envisaged in the 1956 and 1973 constitutions], they were against everything that would give power to their state governments – Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan, KP – same idea. You have to reach out directly to the local bodies to circumvent, to short-circuit these intermediaries which are made of people, politicians who divide the nations. And when Musharraf became president, he made the nazims, the local nazims very strong, for these very reasons. So unitary state supporters are doing the same thing everywhere,” he says.Bunch of Thoughts by M.S. Golwalkar, former RSS Sarsanghchalak, also called for, “The most important and effective step will be to bury at deep for all the talk of a federal structure of our country’s Constitution… and declare ‘One Country, One State, One Legislature, One Executive.”