Many eminent people have been writing about the delimitation problem that is an important dimension of the divide between the peninsula and the Great Indian Plain (GIP), a polite geographical term for northern and eastern India.
The proposals to address the problem—kick it to 2051, create different representation structures, etc—are all technocratic. However, delimitation is a political economy issue, and can only be addressed through a change in the extant political settlement that underpins the foundations of India’s democracy.
Let me define the issue as I see it. The majority of voting Indians live in the GIP; a minority live in the peninsula. This problem has worsened over time due to divergent fertility rates. In parallel, a new divergence has emerged: the economic prosperity of the peninsula is now several times greater than that of the GIP. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have per capita incomes lower than Nepal’s and human development indicators that rank alongside poor African countries. Tamil Nadu and Kerala have per capita incomes three times higher than those GIP states’, and human development levels comparable with upper-middle-income countries’.
This is a fairly rare situation. In federal polities like the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, the economically prosperous regions are also where the majorities live. Hence, political and economic powers are synchronised. It is only in the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia that I observe the Indian case replicated.
This is, therefore, an existential question. When economic prosperity vests with majority-population regions, they can conceivably subsidise the minority in perpetuity, or at least until prosperity is more equalised. When this is not the case—that is, when an economically prosperous minority subsidises a politically powerful but poor majority—an existential conflict is bound to occur.
The outcomes of this problem depend on whether the economic prosperity and/or voting population numbers of the GIP and the peninsula can converge.
I see three scenarios that can deliver a positive outcome.
One, GIP income grows faster than the peninsula’s, so there is convergence. This would lead to an increase in the GIP’s
contribution to public revenues and alleviate the discomfort that is caused by the income distance parameter (inverse of per capita income) having the biggest weight in the Finance Commission’s horizontal devolution formula.
Prognosis: This could have worked 15 years ago. But with a 300 percent differential in per capita income and quality of human capital today, moving the needle would take a very long time. Still, if policymakers are able to come up with a credible strategy to do this, then we would possibly propose a grand bargain whereby delimitation is postponed until the results of economic convergence are both visible and stable.
Two, there is a sharp increase in population movement from the GIP to the peninsula, equalising both population and economic prosperity. Migration would make Biharis into Malayalis, Rajasthanis into Telugus etc.
Prognosis: If this happens at scale, and assimilation happens across 2-3 generations, then delimitation can be consensually postponed until such assimilation happens.
The Indian social fabric is a binding constraint. There is limited linguistic, cultural and caste interoperability between the GIP and the peninsula. Some successful upper castes like the Brahmins and Baniyas have already done this. My grandfather’s family migrated from present-day Bangladesh 117 years ago, and the following two generations chose peninsular spouses—with the result that, in my generation, there is complete assimilation. But this happened because of caste interoperability across GIP and peninsular Brahmins. Other than Vaishyas and some Muslims, this is unlikely to unify other social groups. Also, attachment to land means that primordial links to the less prosperous GIP would endure.
The persistence of feudalism and cheap informal activities in the peninsula are fed by streams of migrants from the GIP. Such migration—the equivalent of working in a third-rate Dubai—does not bring convergence. On the contrary, the power asymmetry heightens tension.
Three, the prosperity of the peninsula increases to 10-15 times the GIP’s.
Prognosis: The sheer economic power of the peninsula would lead to an overwhelming economic control over assets and political power across the nation, irrespective of population. A peninsula with such high prosperity would be globally well integrated.
But such a quantum development transformation in the peninsula would need a social revolution that breaks the primordial bonds that tie it to the GIP—including misogyny, caste exploitation, superstition, and the persistence of a large informal sector. Transcending these limitations needs a vision for prosperity going beyond squabbling over zero-sum games like who contributes how much tax and linguistic quibbles.
I have outlined three future scenarios that can produce positive outcomes. All of them require a new political settlement: for the first two between the GIP and the peninsula, and for the third, some introspective transformation in the peninsula, notwithstanding Delhi’s attempts to impose cultural uniformity and fiscal oppression.
The bottomline: Solutions to the delimitation challenge require proposing, defining and executing political settlements that bring forth a positive outcome. There is no question in my mind that any such outcome will need to be prosperity-based. Unfortunately, what India—be it the GIP or the peninsula—lacks today is an ideology of prosperity within which to frame such a political settlement.
Mere technical fixes to kick the problem into the future are a serious abdication of patriotic responsibility. We would do well to bear in mind that nation states have a limited shelf-life without continuous action to address existential threats. And I can think of no greater threat to the fabulous and hitherto-successful project of building a united and prosperous India than that signalled by the delimitation conundrum.
(Views are personal)
Rathin Roy | Distinguished Professor, Kautilya School of Public Policy, Hyderabad; Visiting Senior Fellow, Overseas Development Institute, London