India's decades-long political truce is over

By Andy Mukherjee

India’s five-decade-long political compromise between an overpopulated, impoverished north and more successful, faster-growing south has just imploded.

With little warning and no attempt at a national dialogue, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced a controversial constitutional amendment bill to expand the size of parliament by roughly 50%. The administration said its goal was to implement a previously passed law that seeks to set aside a third of seats for women. The amendment would allow the change to kick in as early as the next election in 2029; meanwhile, a bulked-up Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, would ensure male lawmakers keep their jobs.

Rahul Gandhi’s Congress Party and other opposition groupings accused the Modi government of using the women’s quota as a ruse. The government’s real intent, they said, was to redraw the balance of power in a way that would be antithetical to the country’s south.

Ultimately, a united opposition managed to defeat the bill in a vote on Friday, handing the government in New Delhi a rare loss. In a televised address Saturday, Modi said that the opposition parties had delivered a “blow to the self-respect and dignity of women.”

The north already dominates national politics: Uttar Pradesh, a state more populous than Brazil and poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, elects 80 members of parliament. That compares with 39 from Tamil Nadu, a southern manufacturing powerhouse. Expanding the 543 constituencies by 50%, and reallocating them based on the 2011 census would raise Tamil Nadu’s tally by 9 seats, but award an extra 53 lawmakers to Uttar Pradesh.

For the prime minister’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, the loss may have been well worth it. With its eye on the future, the BJP is seeking to secure its longer-term fortunes in the post-Modi era. The constitutional amendment may have fallen, but a reset of regional political representation is very much back on the agenda.

That’s bound to help the BJP, whose support comes in part from stoking anti-Muslim religious polarization in the north, the west, and parts of the east. But the more liberal south, which has raced ahead in education, health, and economic growth, would be ill-served by being relegated to a small voice in an expanded parliament. At 650 members, the UK House of Commons is also large. But as MR Madhavan, co-founder of PRS Legislative Research, a New Delhi-based nonprofit, noted in an article last week for The Hindu, it meets for 150 sittings in a year, and every bill is scrutinized by a parliamentary committee. India’s parliament convenes for less than 70 days, and fewer than a fifth of the bills go to committees.

That makes India’s parliament a tool to capture and retain power, rather than a check on executive authority.

The federal government’s control of the national political discourse is already a drag on the south’s developmental aspirations. India has nearly 800 districts, but according to a recent study, half of its output comes from just 13.

The southern states boast of three powerful economic engines: Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Bengaluru in Karnataka, and Hyderabad in Telangana. Another cluster is shaping up in Andhra Pradesh, which has offered $2.4 billion in incentives to Google for a $15 billion AI data-center hub. Although Andhra Pradesh’s current chief minister supports Modi, and the BJP has ruled Karnataka in the past, overall the party hasn’t managed to make a dent in the south. Including Kerala, a popular tourist destination on the southwestern coast, the five southern states are a lot richer than the Hindi-speaking northern heartland. It’s their growth — and of Maharashtra and Gujarat in the west, along with a small industrial and commercial hub around

Against this backdrop, if the north uses its real demographic weight to dictate social, linguistic, and religious norms for the entire country, the more progressive south’s willingness to bankroll the poorer states may ebb. For investors betting on southern Indian engines of higher productivity to pull up living standards across the country, this is the ultimate red flag.

The context to what happened last week dates back to India’s 1947 freedom from British rule. Early elections in the newly independent republic involved a periodic redrawing of electoral boundaries to reflect the population changes as captured by a once-in-a-decade census. The idea was simple enough: All lawmakers across the nation should be elected by broadly similar numbers of voters.

However, this stopped during India’s mid-1970s emergency, a two-year period in which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her younger son Sanjay — Rahul’s grandmother and uncle, respectively — suspended civil liberties, muzzled the press, and ran a draconian campaign of forced sterilizations. She also aggressively amended the constitution, and froze any reordering of constituencies to encourage family planning. Back then, women in India were having more than 5 children on average. But fertility rates were starting to fall in southern states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala that had invested early in female literacy and education. However, these states were wary of losing political representation if constituencies were redrawn every 10 years based on population alone. So they won a long concession, but without a further extension, the freeze on reorganization of seats will finally expire this year.

It is this Pandora’s Box that the Modi government opened last week, amid howls of protests from the south where fertility rates have already crashed well below 2.1, the level needed to replace the existing population. The babies are in north, the jobs in south, and yet permanent migration, which could correct the imbalance, is stunted.

A much-delayed census, the first since 2011, is currently underway. According to PRS Legislative Research, it’s unlikely that its results will become the basis for any redrawing of constituencies for the 2029 election.

However, the BJP may already be thinking of how to keep its Hindu right-wing agenda front and center in national politics in the post-Modi era. That may be the only reason to rush the bill, knowing fully well that Modi’s minority government was unlikely to muster the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution.

In 2029, the prime minister will be 79 and in the top job for 15 years — one less than what fellow strongman Viktor Orban could manage in Hungary before his recent defeat. That’s a reminder to both the BJP and the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, the party’s ideological parent. As political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot said recently in an interview: “You protect your political interests when you still have full control, when you still have the majority and so much support from so many quarters.”

As long as Modi refuses to heed the south’s demand of a further freeze on reordering of political representation, his successor may be able to force it through, perhaps as early as the 2034 election. That’s what is worrying the south. India’s developmental ambitions may be derailed not by a lack of capital, but by a broken internal consensus.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.