North vs South

Dr Shashi Tharoor delivered the keynote address at Dakshin Dialogues 2023 in Bengaluru recently. An edited version of the speech is given in the Open magazine of 30 Oct 2023. I would like to draw the attention of the readers to the salient points raised by Tharoor.

India rewards the brute demographic advantages of the north to the detriment of the south. The south is exploited brutally by the Modi government whose policies are all meant for transmuting India into some bizarre entity envisaged as Hindi-Hindutva-Hindustan. A very obvious illustration of this exploitation is the reduction of funds for the southern states year after year. For every rupee of the tax paid by UP, they receive Rs 1.79 from the centre, and Karnataka receives Re 0.47. Tharoor points out bluntly, “The irony is that historically, the South has been subsidising the North.” Karnataka meets 72% of its expenses from the state’s own taxes while Bihar is able to meet a mere 23% of its expenses by itself. UP, Bihar and other such underperforming states will be rewarded, however, by Modi’s policies.

The North keeps on extracting from the South whatever it can and treats the South like scum.

Modi’s latest decision to change the parliamentary representation of states on the basis of 2011 Census instead of the earlier 1971 Census is yet another sledgehammer-blow on the south. The demographic basis for the parliamentary seats allocated to states was frozen in 1976 on the basis of the 1971 Census in the 42^nd amendment of the Constitution. It was done precisely because the population growth in different states was not similar and hence increasing or decreasing the seats in the central legislature on the basis of population would be discriminatory to all states that keep population growth under control. In 2001, the Vajpayee government judiciously decided to extend the freeze for another 25 years. Why does Modi fail to understand the wisdom of his predecessors? The answer is obvious: his mind understands deviousness far too quickly.

 Is Modi incentivising population growth? Tharoor raises that question in his address. In Tharoor’s own words, “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.”

Is there a hidden agenda? Like weakening the south? Modi’s decision to alter the demographic representation in the parliament will surely lay the axe to the languages and cultures of the southern states which are performing far, far better now than their northern counterparts. The impact on other factors such as economy won’t be any better. Does Modi want to make a Bihar out of Kerala or a UP out of Tamil Nadu? It looks like he does.

It's not only about the revenues and the parliamentary seats. Look at the language policy. The three-language policy is not followed by the north while the south is forced to learn Hindi in addition to their own mother tongues. The people of the north “complacently soak up the benefits of their mother tongue’s dominance while disregarding their obligation to teach and learn a southern language,” Dr Tharoor points out.

Discrimination and exploitation of any section of a country’s population won’t take the country very far in spite of the religious colours and flavours added to the concoction called expedient politics.   

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