How should we judge the defeat of the Narendra Modi government’s 131st Constitution Amendment Bill in India’s Parliament? Can we say India has won and the government has lost? In the political life of a nation, there are moments when the defeat of an elected government becomes synonymous with the victory of the nation. This was one such moment.
To understand this, we need to go beyond the technical minutiae of the three bills. Which census should have been used as a benchmark, 2011 or 2026-27? Should the implementation of women’s reservation have been de-coupled from the delimitation bill that sought to increase the number of seats in Parliament? And should the seat increase have been equal, or proportionate to changing state populations?
A very great deal has been said about these matters. But for much of the politically active public, they constituted utter pedantry. For these citizens, the key question was different. What was the larger purpose of the exercise?
A quota for women’s representation was not the central issue, even though that is how the BJP-led ruling alliance presented it. There was agreement across parties on increasing the number of women in Parliament. An earlier constitutional amendment in 2023, passed almost unanimously by a male-dominated Parliament, had already established that principle.
The central issue was how seats would be distributed among states and, by extension, how power would be shared in the national legislature. Because most regional parties are located in their respective states, this in effect became a question of how much influence each party would wield at the summit of the national power structure.
The BJP holds power primarily in the North and West, not in the South. If the southern proportion of seats went down and the northern proportion went up, the probability of the BJP remaining in power at the Centre would hugely go up.
Already, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), currently under way, is stacked against groups that are less likely to support the BJP while advantaging more privileged groups, such as the upper castes, who have the documents and resources to prove their authenticity as voters, and generally vote for the BJP in large numbers. The opposition asked: would a new delimitation reducing the South’s share of seats, combined with the ongoing SIR, durably tilt the electoral field?
Also read: Delimitation freeze gave us time, but now India’s democracy faces a ticking time bomb
The Tamil Nadu factor
Nowhere is the fear of this logic clearer than in Tamil Nadu, given its history. Scholars and analysts, who are neither sufficiently familiar with that history nor have worked in Tamil Nadu (or generally anywhere in the South), fail to understand the significance of such historically laden political logic. The South in general, and Tamil Nadu in particular, need to be treated with caution, or Delhi will end up playing with fire.
For a better understanding of Tamil Nadu’s politics, we need to pay attention to at least two sets of issues — language and caste. In the 1960s, Tamil Nadu had defied the three-language formula, calling it a veneer for imposing Hindi. In fact, the problem went all the way back to 1937-38, when the newly elected Rajagopalachari government had imposed Hindi as a language of instruction, resulting in mass protests. By 1940, this idea was dropped, only to return as the three-language formula in the 1960s. Tamil Nadu once again witnessed massive protests. The state finally opted for a two-language formula — Tamil and English.
On caste, historical anthropologist Nicholas Dirks has provided the best formulation. If religion was the master narrative of politics in the North, caste has been the master narrative in the South. This is one important reason the BJP has not been able to come to power in the South, with the exception of Karnataka. Even in the North, some of the BJP’s biggest challenges have emerged from caste-based politics, which may be described as the proto-Southernisation of Northern politics. In the North, such politics strongly emerged in the form of Mandal in the 1990s, subsided in the 2010s, and might well appear again.
In what ways does this background help us understand how Tamil Nadu (with the support of all Southern states except Andhra) reacted to the Constitutional Amendment Bill?
Consider some of the statements of MK Stalin, Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister. “If anything is done that harms Tamil Nadu, or that disproportionately enhances the political power of Northern states, ..Tamil Nadu will register its protest with full force. Every family will take to the streets”, adding that “India will once again witness the spirit of the DMK of the 1950s and 1960s.”
In the 1950s, DMK was on the verge of separatism, a problem that was solved by greater federalism on the part of Delhi and later DMK’s rise to power. Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, two of the foremost scholars of comparative federalism, argued that by refusing to adopt federalism, Sri Lanka turned Tamil assertion into Tamil secession. India, by contrast, strengthened federalism and transformed incipient Tamil separatism into Tamil incorporation. They showed that a similar dynamic worked well for Canada’s relationship with Quebec and Spain’s with Catalonia and the Basque Country.
What was the basis for the fear that Southern share of seats would go down? Stalin has clearly stated the cause. “When the Union government urged us to control population growth, to have smaller families, and to follow family planning measures, we complied. Is this now the punishment for having done what was asked of us?” Compared to the North, the population growth in the South has come down.
It should also be noted that the South’s economic might is much greater today than in the 1950s. As Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian show in their recent book, A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, South India has been growing at Chinese growth rates for decades now. Tamil Nadu’s per capita income was only slightly higher than that of Uttar Pradesh in 1960. By 2020, it was more than three times larger. Tamil Nadu’s per capita GDP has even left Gujarat and Maharashtra behind. Should protests against the North break out now, their economic implications will be much greater.
Also read: There’s no avoiding delimitation. Here are 4 possible solutions that don’t ‘hurt’ the South
A modified numbers game
Using a standard democratic principle — one-person-one-vote — one can object to Stalin’s argument, as many have. Why should Tamil Nadu or the South have the same seat share in Parliament, once their population has gone down, even if the decline is for a “higher cause” — namely, having fewer kids and smaller families?
The Constitution gives a clear answer to this question. In India, as in several other polities, the one-person-one-vote rule has always been moderated by the federal principle. Arunachal Pradesh has roughly 15 lakh people and two seats in the Lok Sabha. Delhi has over 2 crore people and 7 seats. If we follow the one-person-one-vote logic, Delhi should have close to 26-27 seats. Yes, the populations were lower in both Arunachal Pradesh and Delhi in 1976, when the constituencies were last delimited, but the comparative difference was far too large even then.
India’s parliamentary power was never entirely numerically drawn. By giving voice to diverse regions, the federal compromise played a big role in turning India into a nation. That national coherence will be gravely threatened if a purely numerical principle is applied now.
The Modi government kept giving oral assurances that no state would lose seats. But that was never inscribed in the bill. And by the time a suggestion to add it as an amendment was made, it was too late. The fear of a devious subterfuge simply could not be eliminated.
The defeat of the bill, thus, has saved India from a federal crisis and a potential national disaster. This is the sense in which the nation won, while the government lost.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)