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{/googleAds} Now her supporters and those of the Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal have begun rallying around the demand for splitting Uttar Pradesh into two, three and four.

Just before her electoral defeat in the assembly polls 2012, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati had played a political gamble by proposing in the state assembly that the state be split into four parts. Her proposal was welcomed by many, though the ruling Samajwadi Party leaders had opposed the idea. The debate however continues, small or big, whether  smaller administrative units open the way to accelerated economic growth and bridge the communication gap.

Bahujan Samaj Party leaders at the local level see political opportunities and a broad-basing of the party organisations. 'From just one now, the BSP could rule four states in future,' feel the BSP leaders.

It was Dr BR Ambedkar who in 1954 had advocated splitting of bigger states in to smaller units. Later the Socialists like Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Jay Prakash Narain, Acharya Kriplani and others favoured re-drawing of the administrative map of India, but Jawahar Lal Nehru, the then prime minister supported the SRC recommendation of reorganising states on linguistic basis. Choudhary Charan Singh also favoured smaller states. Later his son Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Ajit Singh launched a movement for Harit Pradesh, comprising 22 districts of West UP.

It may be recalled that Dr KM Pannikar in his dissenting note to the SRC report, had opposed linguistic states and favoured formation of a state of West UP. For years, a state socialist leader Hukum Singh Parihar had lone-handed carried on his movement for a Braj Pradesh, with Agra as its capital. During the 1975-77 emergency late Sanjay Gandhi almost succeeded in carving out a new state of West UP with Agra as its  capital. The new state was to include parts of Haryana too.

The issue came in sharper focus when Agra lawyers in early 1980s launched a mass movement for a bench of the Allahabad High Court at Agra. The union government set up the Jaswant Singh Commission which supported the demand, justifying the need for a separate bench for West UP. In the 1990s Surekha Yadav's Braj Pradesh party did a lot of work on this front, but response from public was not so enthusiastic.

Almost all political parties have at one point or the other supported the restructuring of the federal polity on a more scientific line, taking into account the area and population, says political analyst Rajeev Saxena. 'Size does make a difference. For political reasons, the Congress party has been averse to splitting bigger states into smaller ones and pointlessly dragging feet on such demands as is happening in Andhara Pradesh. Earlier the Uttarakhand movement was unnecessarily prolonged for years. The time has come when a comprehensive exercise to redraw the political map of India should be carried out through a new States Reorganisation Commission,' suggests social scientist Paras Nath Choudhary, ex-researcher at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University.

With Telengana now becoming the reality people in the Taj city are excited and looking  forward to a whole lot of new opportunities, should the dream for a separate state of West UP take shape. 'With the unwieldy size of Uttar Pradesh Agra region has always got a raw deal, with all the funds and tax revenues siphoned off to eastern districts. A new state of West UP, whatever its name, would definitely spur growth and also inculcate a sense of pride and identity,' says Sudhir Gupta, an activist.