[lg policy] India: Modi Government's Latest Move To Further North-South Divide

Thu Mar 22 14:24:24 UTC 2018

 Modi Government's Latest Move To Further North-South Divide
Published: March 22, 2018 17:57 IST

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Stalin's
letter
<https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/mk-stalin-writes-to-pm-modi-10-chief-ministers-on-15th-finance-commission-1827036>,
Pawan Kalyan's tweet
<https://twitter.com/PawanKalyan/status/965064871426445313> or Siddaramaiah's
Facebook post
<https://www.facebook.com/Siddaramaiah.Official/posts/602181456793987> 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.

Comments
*(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)*

*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.*

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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