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<div class="gmail-ins_headline"><h1>Modi Government's Latest Move To Further North-South Divide</h1></div><div class="gmail-firstpublising"><span>Published: March 22, 2018 17:57 IST</span></div><div class="gmail-googletextad gmail-marginb20 gmail-clr"><div id="gmail-googlead" class="gmail-googlead"><div style="display:block" id="gmail-google_ads_bar"><div id="gmail-taboola-above-article-text-links" class="gmail-trc_related_container gmail-trc_spotlight_widget gmail-trc_tl gmail-trc_tl_responsive gmail-trc_tl_responsive_trc_80790"><div class="gmail-trc_rbox_container" style="display:block"><div><div id="gmail-trc_wrapper_80790" class="gmail-trc_rbox gmail-text-links-b gmail-trc-content-sponsored" style="overflow:hidden;display:block"><div id="gmail-internal_trc_80790" style="width:auto"><div class="gmail-trc_header_ext"><div class="gmail-logoDiv gmail-link-adc"><a class="gmail-trc_desktop_adc_link gmail-trc_attribution_position_top" rel="nofollow" href="https://popup.taboola.com/en/?template=colorbox&utm_source=ndtv&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=text-links-b:Above Article Text Links - NDTV:" target="_blank"><span class="gmail-trc_adc_wrapper"><span class="gmail-trc_adc_s_logo"></span> </span><span class="gmail-trc_logos_v_align"> </span></a></div><div class="gmail-logoDiv gmail-link-attribution"><a class="gmail-trc_desktop_attribution_link gmail-trc_attribution_position_top" rel="nofollow" href="https://popup.taboola.com/en/?template=colorbox&utm_source=ndtv&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=text-links-b:Above Article Text Links - NDTV:" target="_blank"><span>by Taboola</span><span class="gmail-trc_logos_v_align"> </span></a></div><div class="gmail-logoDiv gmail-link-disclosure gmail-attribution-disclosure-link-sponsored"><span>Sponsored Links</span><span class="gmail-trc_logos_v_align"> </span></div></div><span class="gmail-trc_rbox_header_span"></span></div><div class="gmail-trc_clearer"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail-ins_left_rhs"><div class="gmail-st_story_topshare"><div class="gmail-st_sharebar_new"><div class="gmail-st_sharebar_left"><div class="gmail-total_count"> <span>Share</span></div><a class="gmail-n_tw"></a><a class="gmail-n_fb"></a><a class="gmail-n_gp"></a><a class="gmail-n_rd"></a><a class="gmail-n_li"></a></div></div></div><div class="gmail-ins_storybody" id="gmail-ins_storybody">
Over the past week, I took one flight in
to Bengaluru and one flight out. The flight in was from Heathrow,
British Airways non-stop from London to Karnataka's capital. It had
announcements in Kannada, besides English. The flight out was to Goa, on
IndiGo. It had announcements in Hindi, besides English. If you think
there is nothing odd and infuriating about this, then you must be from
the Hindi belt. The young man next to me on the IndiGo flight,
travelling from a Kannada-speaking state to a Konkani - and
Portuguese-speaking state, had no idea what the announcements were
saying. He didn't turn off his phone, for example, because he wasn't
told he should. To top it all, the member of the cabin crew who came
over to tell him to do so told him in Hindi (and rather brusquely). This
systematic corporate idiocy would have been comic if not for the fact
that the nice young man was embarrassed, upset and, I think, angered in
consequence.<br><br>To be from a non-Hindi state in today's India is to
deal with a hundred little humiliations. Tweet from Bengaluru, as I did
last week, and your location attached to the tweet will come up not in
English or Kannada but in Hindi. That is Twitter India's demented
conception of friendly and sensitive language policy, apparently. (A
request for clarification on whether Twitter India would change this
insane policy is still unheeded as I write this. Perhaps because I asked
on Twitter, and who really feels like checking Twitter these days, not
even Twitter itself.)<br><br>That is the broader cultural and social
context in which we must situate what appears to be a very technocratic
dispute that has recently cropped up involving the southern states of
the Union. MK Stalin, the leader of Tamil Nadu's opposition, has written
a letter questioning the terms of reference of the Fifteenth Finance
Commission - an issue that may seem unimportant but in fact is pivotal
for India's future as a united and harmonious country. Stalin joins
other state leaders - including Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah,
and Pawan Kalyan, the film star-turned-politician in Andhra Pradesh - in
drawing attention to this apparently unimportant disagreement.<br><br>What,
you ask, could be at stake here? How could it be political enough to
draw in three state leaders, and momentous enough to affect our destiny
as a country? Well, Finance Commissions are a vitally important feature
of our constitutional set-up. Every five years, the commission decides
how tax revenue will be divided between various states (this is, of
course, an even more important formula in the post-GST era). The more
the commission's formula favours a particular state or set of states,
the more money the state government gets from the national kitty to
spend.<br><div id="gmail-checked"><div id="gmail-adslotNativeVideo"><div id="gmail-google_ads_iframe_/1068322/NDTV_News_ROS_Native_Outstream_0__container__" style="border:0pt none"></div></div></div><br>One
of the criteria used in this division is the state's share of the
national population. This is natural, and as it should be. But the
population shares used for this calculation have traditionally been
frozen at the level determined by the 1971 census. The next finance
commission, however, has been told by the Modi government to use the
population shares of the 2011 census. And that's where the controversy
comes in. Because in the decades between the 1971 and 2011 censuses, the
share of the south (and of several other states) in India's population
has declined. In other words, the Hindi heartland will, thanks to its
abysmal failure to undertake family planning, get a larger share of
taxes, thanks entirely to this one decision by the Modi government.<br><br>It
should thus be clear why this decision has the possibility of blowing
up into becoming a major issue. Nor is it irrelevant that this decision
has been taken by a government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is
almost entirely a party of the North and West - and, even more
importantly, is seen as such in most of the rest of the country.
North-South relations in India have been kept from boiling over for
decades mainly thanks to careful compromises which are rarely talked
about politically. One such is the decision to freeze the number of Lok
Sabha seats given to each state for decades. This decision, taken in
2002, postpones redistributing constituencies across states till the
2030s. As a consequence, the southern states have more seats now than
their population share would really suggest they should have. This
careful compromise was a product of the coalition era, in which neither
the Congress, then a truly pan-India party, nor the Vajpayee-era BJP and
the various regional parties that depended on each other for power in
New Delhi, felt it was useful or wise to politicise the consequences of
divergent population growth. Today's politics is different. The BJP is
now dominant in Hindi-speaking India; it seeks to expand into the
regions dominated by its erstwhile partners. The incentives of all
political players have thus changed. The BJP is happy to increase the
domination of its political heartland. And the regional players will be
happy to corner the BJP by pointing out its Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan
character.<br><br>Political bargaining is not always about fairness. But
is there a question of fairness here as well? There are two competing
arguments. Here is the first: we are all Indians, we should not be
valued differently. A vote in UP should count for as much as a vote in
Tamil Nadu. A poor person in Bihar is as deserving of government support
as a poor person in Andhra Pradesh; her government should not be given
less money for her welfare. That would be the consequence of ignoring
the changes in population shares since 1971. Such injustice would tear
the country apart.<br><br>Here is the second: states and societies that
have struggled and succeeded should be rewarded. As late as the 1950s,
Kerala was a basket case. As late as the early 1990s, many of Andhra
Pradesh's development indicators looked like Uttar Pradesh's. These
states and their governments have worked hard to turn themselves around.
Most importantly, they - along with others, like West Bengal - have
invested in women's empowerment, and as a result they have declining
total fertility. In other words, empowered women, like everywhere else
in the world, are having fewer babies in these states. States like UP
and Bihar have not done the hard work needed to improve development
indicators, including empowering their women; thus they have a
still-exploding population, even as the South and East see their
populations decline. Rewarding states for failing is fundamentally
unfair to those who have made sacrifices in the past. Such injustice
would tear the country apart.<br><br>The fundamental social and economic
disconnect between the North/West and South/East will continue to grow.
Soon, it will be expressed in moral terms, and take on greater
political weight. When combined with the easy Hindi supremacism that
comes so easily to companies, politicians, and intellectuals from the
North, it will become explosive. There are few easy solutions to this;
but whatever solution exists will emerge from reasonable discussion and
compromise. Nobody in the North should dismiss <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/mk-stalin-writes-to-pm-modi-10-chief-ministers-on-15th-finance-commission-1827036">Stalin's letter</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/PawanKalyan/status/965064871426445313">Pawan Kalyan's tweet</a> or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Siddaramaiah.Official/posts/602181456793987">Siddaramaiah's Facebook post</a>
as irrelevant, or stupid, or separatist, or as "petty politics". The
danger lies in thinking that the unity of the Republic of India is not
something that has to constantly be fought for.<br><br><a class="gmail-showFilePanel"><div class="gmail-comment_story"><span><em class="gmail-ndtv-detailp-comments-number"></em> Comments</span></div></a><em>(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)</em><br><br><strong>Disclaimer:
The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of
the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not
reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or
liability for the same.</strong></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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