In Software-Defined Networking (SDN), the importance of multi-controller operation is widely accepted mainly for 1) avoiding a single point of failure at the centralized SDN controller, and 2) scaling and load-balancing the control plane in large networks. Information exchange among SDN controllers is crucial for an end-to-end functioning of the routing and other applications like measurement and QoS. However, such information exchange introduces a scalability problem in the distributed architecture involving high communication overhead and long convergence time across the networks. The key concept of our solution against the problem is partitioning of the multi-controller SDN into the proper number of network chunks with the proper number of SDN controllers to operate in each chunk. This paper proposes VIBHAJAN, a control plane management mechanism 1) to find optimum groups of SDN controllers, 2) to isolate the information exchange within a logical boundary called Area, and 3) to enable information exchange between areas throughout the entire network. The implementation of VIBHAJAN currently facilitates a routing mechanism. The evaluation results show an approximate 50% reduction in communication overhead and 50% faster convergence compared to the broadcast-based multi-controller operation. Performance of the partitioning algorithm under different topologies is also shown. VIBHAJAN promises to facilitate a variety of network functions and applications over multi-controller SDN in a lightweight and scalable manner. © 2018 IEEE.