India’s next election has a theme — southern discomfort

India's next election is still four years away, but battle lines are already getting drawn in the country's more prosperous south.

M.K. Stalin, the rather improbably named chief minister of Tamil Nadu, is trying to mobilize his neighbors against what he perceives as a grand plan by northern politicians, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu right-wing party, to extend their hegemony.

The trigger for the pushback is the Modi government's decision to revise regional representation in national parliament with updated population data. Such a reshuffle could erode the south's political relevance, despite its higher per capita income, greater investment success, and superior track record on education and health.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the exercise is to have each lawmaker represent roughly the same number of electors. While that's a good organizing principle for any democracy, there was a valid reason why India put a 25-year moratorium on the practice by amending its constitution in 1976. Back then, the biggest priority was to control explosive population growth. It made no sense to reward regions that were making more babies with higher representation. Modi's own party, when it was in power in 2001, extended the freeze to 2026.

As the long-delayed reset finally gets underway after a new census, the south may lose big. The combined parliamentary strength of the five southern states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — could slide by 26 seats, or a fifth of the current total of 129, according to analysts. That would help the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Even after winning the national elections three times in a row, the BJP has only 29 lawmakers from the south in the 545-member parliament. Not one of the 240 seats it won in last year's polls was from Tamil Nadu.

Modi's government has denied that electoral redistricting has a political motive. Amit Shah, the federal home minister, has promised that the south won't lose any seats. But then more constituencies may need to be created in the north, bulking up the size of parliament. Either way, the progressive part of India might end up with a smaller say over national affairs compared with Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, collectively referred to as "BIMARU," a pejorative Hindi word for sick.

That would be unfair. After all, it was the south that empowered women with education and jobs, crunching fertility rates to below levels required for population replacement. As a result, those states today face an emerging labor shortage. Meanwhile, women are still having three or more babies in some parts of India's north, where there is little job creation and poverty rates are often at sub-Saharan levels. The regional disparities, instead of dissipating over time, are growing. As I wrote last year, a child born in Kerala has a better chance of surviving to age five than in the US. In Uttar Pradesh, the odds are worse than in Afghanistan.

The south believes it has already paid more than its fair share to help the north catch up. The taxes it generates are liberally redirected by the federal government to the north: Uttar Pradesh, India's most-populous state, gets more federal tax revenue than all of the south. But the resource transfers are failing to check the divergence in their performance. The fast-growing southern region fears that it will be punished again — and this time, fatally -- by taking away its political voice.

What damage might a loss of representation do? The big worry is that the Modi government or its successor will continue to weaponize tax resources to make the south more like the north. For instance, New Delhi has refused to release nearly $230 million in education funds until Tamil Nadu, which has always only mandated Tamil and English in its schools, accepts a new federal policy that requires three languages to be taught. Stalin says he won't bow to any pressure to force Hindi — a predominantly north Indian language — on a people who rejected such an imposition even under British colonial rule in 1938. (After India's 1947 independence, too, there were anti-Hindi agitations and riots.) 

Superficially, it's a battle about the best utilization of scarce resources: hire Hindi teachers or pay for a new science lab? Deep down, there is serious economic misgiving. Why should Tamil Nadu, with per capita income of $3,800, burden its kids with the language of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which are three to five times poorer? Being forced to do so may be "antithetical to our performance," P Thiaga Rajan, Tamil Nadu's minister for information technology, said in a recent interview with The Wire. "Now if you say we're not even going to have representation, it drives me into a panic," he added. 

The south's rejection of the BJP's Hindu-majoritarian politics is crucial, and not just for regional politicians like Thiaga Rajan and his boss, Stalin. Rahul Gandhi's Congress Party, the main national opposition, has lost most of its sway in the north and west to Modi's relentless rise, but it's in power in two southern states. 

Modi's third term in power may be the 74-year-old prime minister's last, but not necessarily his party's. While the administration in New Delhi is distracted by US President Donald Trump's trade war, sputtering domestic demand and falling stock prices, the BJP is still determined to win. After all, the decadal census scheduled for 2021 was never conducted, even though the pandemic, the original reason behind the delay, is long over. As commentators have speculated, that's perhaps because new data for redistricting must come from a population count taken after 2026.

A big change in India's electoral map could make the 2029 polls moot — the contest may be over even before the first vote is cast. That's the genesis of the nation's brewing southern discomfort.  

Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and is published by a special syndication arrangement.