Decoding the Divide

THIS BOOK IS a historian’s deep dive into modern India’s demographic evolution. This is a history with rich primary sources ever since the first Census was conducted in the country in 1872. So, we have a full picture of the past 150 years to discern India’s population growth and all the regional variations and nuances of it. The latter point interests Ravi K Mishra the most in Demography Representation Delimitation. This is not just an academic exercise, given the implications for highly topical and political questions such as the North-South demographic divide and its impact on future representation in Parliament and state Legislative Assemblies.

This is a meaty and empirically dense work—its main conclusions are striking and question the prevalent conventional wisdom that the Southern states have managed their demographic growth better than the Northern states.

Mishra’s analysis reveals that different parts of the country have different demographic histories and transitions. The population of the Southern states had high growth rates—well above the national average—till the 1960s. As a consequence, the Southern share in the population of the country was at its peak in 1971 after which growth rates started slowing down. The Northern states showed the opposite trend: in the period up to the 1960s its growth rates were low and therefore its share of the population was a smaller fraction than it had been in the 1870s.

The political takeaway from these trends is of political representation. A freeze of Lok Sabha seats and composition in terms of state wise distribution was affected in 1976. The current debate is whether to unfreeze that composition considering the latest Census figures and both increase the size of Lok Sabha and also allow for changes in the distribution of seats on the basis of one person one vote. Given current population trends and levels this would mean an increase of representation from the North and a proportional or relative decrease in the share of the Southern states.

In Mishra’s perspective the 1976 freeze led to an “anomaly in representation” since Northern states were comparatively disadvantaged in demographic terms as compared to the South. This in his view is the central issue rather than optical illusions that states are being penalised for more effective population and birth control policies. His overall country-wide conclusion also merits being quoted:

“… the distortion in the present scheme of political representation is quite pronounced……..the south is highly overrepresented in Parliament; the east is marginally over represented; the west is considerably under represented and the north is highly underrepresented. Thus, the divide is not really north versus south; rather, it is south versus the rest.”

The hallmark of a good history book is its capacity to address hitherto unposed questions. Mishra’s empirically detailed and analytically rigorous work certainly satisfies both these criteria. Also like any good history book it is simultaneously deeply revisionist.

His conclusions will certainly be analysed in detail by demographers and will be much debated. Yet his analysis poses other fundamental questions. The most fundamental of these is how majorities and minorities should interface in a democracy. At one point Mishra refers to the “overwhelming demographic size of Hindi speaking north”—although he does not use the term majority that is what he is referring to. Perhaps there is also merit in seeing the representation/delimitation debate as a majority minority debate and thereafter deriving policy takeaways in the context of the fact that the real litmus test of the quality of a democracy is how its minorities are represented. This book is timely and provocative.

booksDelimitationdemographyDemography Representation Delimitation: The North-South Divide In IndiahistoryParliamentpoliticsRavi K Mishra