Bringing Back The Textbook Concept

The formal creation this week of the union territories (UTs) of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh has brought new attention to a concept that most people just remember as a page in their school textbooks for civics lessons.
The first indication that an independent India might need an administrative concept like ‘union territory’ perhaps emerged around 1948 in a short announcement that the government was constituting an advisory council to the chief commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. A report in the Times of India (ToI) in October 1948 admitted that “few people in this country realize that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are part of the Indian Union territory”. Most people probably only knew of them as a penal settlement and, more recently, for reports of abuses during the Japanese occupation. But now, I noted, “the creation of this advisory machinery is perhaps the first step in the constitutional development of the islands”.