NEW DELHI: India’s most industrialised state in the south is pushing back against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to reshape parliamentary constituencies based on population size, the latest sign of the growing regional divide in the country.
The federal government plans to conduct a delimitation exercise to rejig the number of seats in the Parliament to reflect the changes in the country’s population since 1971.
India’s prosperous southern states, which have low fertility rates, fear that the process will further reduce their representation in the Lower House of Parliament, the Lok Sabha.
M.K. Stalin, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state, organised a meeting of regional politicians on March 5 to protest against the Modi government plans.
He has been criticising the population-based restructuring for a while now, and at the meeting, he proposed that a committee be formed with leaders from southern India to collectively fight delimitation, according to the Press Trust of India.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party dominates in the largely northern Hindi-speaking states, where fertility rates are higher.
The BJP stronghold of Uttar Pradesh – where the population is over 200 million, more than Brazil – has nearly 15 per cent of parliamentarians in the Lok Sabha, with that number expected to rise after redrawing of the constituencies.
“Do not penalise the southern states that took responsible measures to control population growth,” Stalin said in a video posted last week on the social media platform X.
“Constituency delimitation directly impacts our state’s self-respect, social justice and welfare schemes for the people.”
Electoral representation is not the only issue that is widening the rift between the southern states and the BJP.
Stalin, who has governed Tamil Nadu since 2021, has also been criticising the BJP’s push to popularise the Hindi language in the Tamil-speaking state through education reforms and legislation.
“Make Tamil an official language on a par with Hindi and allot more funds for Tamil than a dead language like Sanskrit,” he said on X on March 5.
The five southern states contribute around 30 per cent to the nation’s gross domestic product, according to industry lobby Confederation of Indian Industry, and are major employment generators, with cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru being home to the world’s biggest tech giants.
The BJP has repeatedly failed to oust regional parties in the south.
Despite their economic output, the southern states have often complained that they are not given their fair share of federal funds by the Modi government.
The ruling party has said that the southern states will not lose electoral representation after the delimitation exercise, but those assurances have been dismissed by prominent regional leaders.
In a post in February, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said that an organised struggle will be waged by southern states in the coming days to fight against the injustice meted out by the federal government. - Bloomberg
