The public calls by two southern chief ministers, Andhra Pradesh’s Chandrababu Naidu and Tamil Nadu’s M K Stalin—even if one may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek and the other seemingly in earnest—has once again brought focus on the imminent challenges facing the southern states from their declining populations.
There is no doubt that the population of the southern states has been growing much slower than that of the north for some decades, resulting in significant disparities. This has already had consequences in the award of the most recent Finance Commission, which has reduced the amount of central revenues being distributed to the southern states because of the increased weightage given to population in their calculations. Matters have come to a head with the imminence of the delayed 2021 census, which is now expected to conclude in 2026. Leaders in the south have suddenly woken up to the serious implications that a new census will have for their states.
While northern states such as Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh had a decadal population growth of over 20 percent between 2001 and 2011, southern states like undivided Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu grew at less than 16 percent in the 2001-11 period. My own state of Kerala has the country’s lowest growth rate (4.9 percent over the decade, or less than half a percent a year). That is one-fifth of Bihar’s growth rate. When the census is conducted, it will almost certainly show that Kerala has lost population since 2011. Andhra Pradesh is not far behind and may well find itself in the same boat.
The consequences of this declining demography will soon be apparent on the vital issue 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 NDA government of Prime Minister Vajpayee extended this arrangement for another 25 years in what became the 84th Amendment.
The thinking behind this policy was clear: it was based on the sound principle that the reward for responsible stewardship by a state of its 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 one that, by failing to empower its women and reducing total fertility, has allowed its population to shoot through the roof—no federal democracy can live with the perception that states would lose political clout if they develop well, while others would gain more seats in parliament as a reward for failure.
This is the carefully balanced arrangement that the Modi government caused to be undone by instructing the Finance Commission to use the 2011 census figures instead of the 1971 figures. Once the 2025 census reveals that the Hindi belt states are less well-represented in the Lok Sabha than their population justifies, the BJP has made it clear it also intends to re-delimit the number of constituencies to give them more representatives in parliament.
This raises 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 failed since 1971 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. Thanks to the Finance Commission’s new formula, that that has made them eligible for a larger share of tax revenues. Now, following the first delimitation exercise after 2026 (as specified in the 84th Amendment), they will also receive and wield greater political authority by the sheer weight of numbers.
This is what lies behind the surprising appeals made by Naidu and Stalin. Why should southern states be punished for their impressive performance on human development by receiving less revenue and losing seats in parliament, thereby being forced to dilute their voice in national affairs?
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 you get. But in a country like India, whose diversity is held together by a sense of common belonging, but whose democracy must accommodate their differences, it is essential that all feel 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 power”—risks rupturing the fragile bonds that hold us all together.
We have already seen the south being aggrieved by the ruling party’s aggressive promotion of linguistic nationalism. 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 disparaged daily with scant regard for the utility to India of its officialdom mastering a world language. Now, the south would face political disenfranchisement to go along with its sense of financial victimisation and linguistic marginalisation—a combination that is bound to generate resentments that can spill over beyond the confines of daily politics.
The only remedy is a more decentralised democracy, in which the political authority of New Delhi is not so overwhelming. That could make these concerns less relevant.
What would a decentralised democracy mean? Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah has argued that India is evolving from a ‘union of states’ into a ‘federation of states’. This may be wishful thinking for now, in an era when a glib phrase like ‘cooperative federalism’ masks the reality of over-centralisation. But we should consider how to take India in that direction. Could we revise the number of subjects in the Union list and give more responsibilities (and resources) to the states?
Our ‘quasi-federal’ system cannot mean that the states have little or no autonomy, and feel themselves the handmaidens of New Delhi. Reviving the Inter-State Council to give them a greater voice, or even rethinking the Rajya Sabha to strengthen state representation along the lines of the US Senate—ensuring that no one group of states can impose their wishes unilaterally on the rest—are some of the ideas that deserve consideration.
What the south needs is not more babies, but better ideas—and a chance to discuss them seriously in Delhi.
(Views are personal)
(office@tharoor.in)
Shashi Tharoor | Fourth-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Sahitya Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life