For the Sake of the South
Time to stop geographic discrimination
Shashi Tharoor
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20 Oct, 2023
(Illustration: Saurabh Singh)
THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY’S (BJP) hyper-nationalist desire for uniformity too often rides roughshod over the federalism that keeps our diverse country united. The prime minister speaks of cooperative federalism, but it seems only one side is required to ‘co-operate’ while the Union government ‘operates’ at its own sweet will. The government’s decision in 2017 to change the terms of reference of the Fifteenth Finance Commission to base allocations on the 2011 Census, rather than the 1971 Census, had already prised open a North–South divide, opening a Pandora’s Box with incalculable consequences for the country. The finance commission’s revised allocations have sent even more tax money from the South to the North than previously.
As the south Indian data analyst, Nilakantan RS, author of a book called South vs North: India’s Great Divide, wrote, “India rewards the brute demographic advantage of north India over a state’s performance.” Nilakantan wrote that the Fifteenth Finance Commission was “a stunning rebuke of success”, and “the future of the Indian union may well unravel based on its decisions”: “The bind that Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in particular, find themselves in is: they are at a stage where their success is being used against them by [the Union government], which is seeking to aggressively redistribute resources based on brute demographic might. These states made improvements in health to find that the reward for that is to have less money to spend on health; their improvements in education meant they would have less money to spend on education.”
The reason is that previous finance commissions had based themselves on population figures from the 1971 Census. That may seem odd, since we have had four Censuses since 1971, and new numbers have been available to successive finance commissions. But the reason for this is very simple, and it was made explicit in relation to an even more vital issue—that of political representation in our Parliament. In 1976, the omnibus 42nd Amendment to the Constitution decided to freeze the allocation of Lok Sabha seats to our states for 25 years to encourage population control, by assuring states that success in limiting population would not lose them Lok Sabha seats. In 2001, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government of Prime Minister Vajpayee extended this arrangement for another 25 years; its proposal, which became the 91st Amendment, was unanimously adopted by all parties in both Houses of Parliament.
This policy was based on the sound principle that the reward for responsible stewardship by a state of demography and human development could not be political disenfranchisement. While there is some logic to the argument that a democracy must value all its citizens equally—whether they live in a progressive state or in one that, by failing to empower its women and reduce total fertility, has allowed its population to shoot through the roof—no federal democracy can survive the perception that states would lose political clout if they developed well, while others would gain more seats in Parliament as a reward for failure.
This is the carefully balanced arrangement that the Modi government carelessly caused to be undone by instructing the finance commission to use the 2011 Census figures instead of the 1971 figures. The Sixteenth Finance Commission will be worse and if the next Census takes place soon after the 2024 elections, as the home minister has said, it will be worse still for the South, since population disparities have only worsened. The irony is that historically, the South has been subsidising the North; for example, for every one rupee of tax contributed by Uttar Pradesh (UP), that state receives `1.79, whereas for every one rupee of tax contributed by Karnataka, the state receives `0.47. All southern states recognise the need to correct regional imbalances, and for richer states to subsidise poorer ones. But it is fair to ask, as Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah once did, “Where is the reward for development?” He added that, if population was an important criterion for the apportionment of Central taxes, “for how long can we keep incentivising population growth?”
The iniquities are measurable. To take just one example, Karnataka meets 72 per cent of its expenses from the state’s own taxes, whereas Bihar covers just 23 per cent, getting 77 per cent of its expenses from Central taxes. In other words, unlike most federal systems, India’s revenues are going disproportionately to its worst-performing states, those with poor levels of education, high rates of fertility and population growth, while the high-performance states in the south get short shrift.
These are important questions that the rest of India can ill afford to ignore. The states of the ‘cow belt’—the Hindi-speaking heartland, once called the BIMARU states—have comprehensively failed to improve their development indicators, notably relating to female literacy and women’s empowerment. As a result, their population growth has outstripped that of the southern states. And in the current dispensation, that skewed population growth in poorly performing northern states makes them eligible for a larger share of tax revenues.
The Constitution says in Article 1 that we are a Union of States. As a result, we have created an interesting hybrid that many have dubbed as ‘quasi- federal’. There is, in the Constitution, a distribution of powers between the Union and the states. There are 47 items on the Concurrent List on which both the Union and the states can make laws. That the balance has been tilting towards the Union in recent years is beyond dispute. The increasing resort to levying cess on a large number of items which, unlike tax, does not need to be shared with states, is merely the most striking illustration of this.
While there is some logic to the argument that a democracy must value all its citizens equally—whether they live in a progressive state or in one that, by failing to empower its women and reduce total fertility, has allowed its population to shoot through the roof—no federal democracy can survive the perception that states would lose political clout if they developed well, while others would gain more seats in parliament as a reward for failure
The country should pay attention to the great dangers arising from these issues, as well as the even greater dangers that will arise from the North’s enhanced political clout in Parliament after the 91st Amendment (freezing such matters on the basis of the 1971 Census) lapses in 2026. The government has made it clear there will be a new delimitation of constituencies. Even the Women’s Reservation Bill can only be implemented after delimitation is done. If the intention is, as many suspect, to fill the rather cavernous hall of the new Lok Sabha building, then UP alone will have more MPs post delimitation than all the southern states put together. Where does it leave our federalism if, for instance, the Hindi-speaking states can alone muster a two-thirds majority in Parliament to amend the Constitution? What would prevent them, for instance, from passing a law making Hindi the official national language?
The tyranny of population numbers will make things worse for a while yet. Take the demographic patterns, for example. While northern states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and UP had a decadal population growth rate of over 20 per cent between 2001 and 2011, southern states like undivided Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu grew at less than 16 per cent in the 2001–11 period. Kerala has the country’s lowest growth rate (4.9 per cent over the decade of 2001–11, and dropping, it is estimated, to negative growth in the next Census). That is one-fifth of Bihar’s growth rate. If one looks at the bigger picture, Kerala’s population grew 56 per cent between 1971 and 2011, Tamil Nadu’s 75 per cent; but Rajasthan’s grew 166 per cent, Bihar’s 146 per cent, and UP’s 132 per cent. There are reassuring claims that all these numbers are in the process of converging as family sizes go down everywhere, but the fact is, for now, the divergences seem set to continue: Tamil Nadu’s fertility rate is 1.6 and Kerala’s 1.7, whereas UP’s is 3 and Bihar’s 3.2.
This raises the question: Why should Kerala be punished for its impressive performance by receiving less revenue from the finance commission and also losing seats in Parliament, thereby being forced to dilute its voice in national affairs? Why should Tamil Nadu’s reward for extraordinary economic success, sustained growth and population control be lower tax revenues from the Centre?
The government’s answer would be that those are the rules of democracy: one-person-one-vote means the more people you have, the more political clout and tax rupees you get. But in a country like India, whose diversity is held together by a sense of common belonging but whose civic nationalism must accommodate a range of states with divergent levels of development, it is essential that all feel that their common nationhood is a winning proposition for them. In a country where regional, religious, and linguistic tensions are never far from the surface, such an answer—“we have more people, so we will have more money and more power”—risks rupturing the fragile bonds that hold us all together.
The only remedy is to acknowledge that we need a more decentralised democracy, one in which the central share of tax resources is not so crucial. If the government is conscious of these concerns, it should convene a serious discussion with the southern states to discuss their apprehensions and explore formulae for resolving them
DIVERSITY DOES NOT appeal to a government which has embarked on a quixotic exercise of ‘one nation, one election’. You cannot mend a broken mirror. This mirror which first cracked in the elections of 1967 has now been shattered into so many pieces that we have elections in one state or the other every six months. Given what has happened to our other democratic institutions, that is no bad thing, since elections are now the only instruments for the public to demand accountability from their rulers. The prime minister talks about the expense of repeated elections, but studies show that the difference is negligible. It’s about `5,000 per voter, according to a NITI Aayog study.
We have 543 parliamentary constituencies, 4,033 state Assembly constituencies, 87, 942 local-body seats, 31,46,163 village panchayat seats, and you want to elect all of them simultaneously. It is going to be absurdly challenging, given the fact that each of these has its own constitutional authorities, its own constitutional rights, its own constitutional limitations. It is bizarre to try and press them into the fantasy of an illusionary uniformity.
As it is, the Hindi–Hindutva–Hindustan politics of today’s BJP is very different from the conciliatory coalition-building of the Vajpayee era when BJP was last in power. The brazenness of Hindi supremacism that infuses their discourse has already raised disquiet among many southern politicians. Allied to this is an insensitive management of crucial federal issues, such as the botched allocation to states of funds from the State Disaster Risk Management Fund (SDRMF) for relief measures during the coronavirus lockdown.
We have already seen how much the South is aggrieved by the ruling party’s aggressive promotion of ‘linguistic nationalism’ and increasing calls for the adoption of Hindi as the national language. The three-language formula is breached by Hindi-speaking states that are complacently soaking up the benefits of their mother tongue’s increasing dominance while disregarding their obligation to teach and learn a southern language; meanwhile, southern civil servants are suffering the burden of the government’s increasing linguistic homogenisation, while English is daily disparaged with scant regard for the utility to India of its officialdom mastering a world language. The financial and political consequences of this attitude threaten the very unity of India, since the South would face political disenfranchisement to go along with its sense of financial victimisation—a combination that is bound to generate resentments that can spill over beyond the confines of quotidian politics.
The South is aggrieved by the ruling party’s calls for the adoption of Hindi as the national language. The three-language formula is breached by Hindi-speaking states soaking up benefits of their mother tongue’s increasing dominance while disregarding their obligation to teach a Southern language
Such concerns should ignite deep disquiet among all well-wishers of Indian democracy, and all inclusive-minded Indian nationalists. The only remedy is to acknowledge that we need a more decentralised democracy, one in which the Central share of tax resources is not so crucial, and the political authority of New Delhi not so overwhelming. But as long as our system is what it is, we need to run it sensitively. If the government is genuinely conscious of these concerns, it should convene a serious discussion, perhaps through NITI Aayog, with the southern states to discuss their apprehensions and explore formulae for resolving them.
The South is both literally and metaphorically invested in the North, and in the collective India of which we are all proud. We are as passionate about the idea of India as anyone in the North is. But that India—in keeping with the vision of giants like Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru—should be pluralist, equitable and inclusive. Allowing such divisive trends to fester into problems is not in anyone’s interests— above all, not in India’s.
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