The southern states must now confront the inequalities within

The failure of the government to get its bills passed — combining women’s reservation and delimitation of parliamentary constituencies — has received a mixed response. While the tussle over the Bill has typically been seen as a battle between the North and the South, it need not be. It can be seen as an argument between those who see India as a unitary state and those who see it as a federal one.

In a Subcontinent of such diversity, the federalists would naturally view a rising share of any one region with concern. There is already a disparity in the number of seats between the North and the South. A continuing redistribution following population growth would leave the South with declining representation in the Lok Sabha. The South has witnessed occasions when its cultural independence has come under threat. The move to institute Hindi as the sole official language of India in the mid-60s was the most important one. This was resolved with remarkable political maturity, with the South given an assurance that English will continue as one of the official languages of the country till its states desire it.

This historic compromise appears to have been forgotten since 2014, when the central government tried to promote Hindi at the expense of English and other Indian languages — naming central government schemes in the language and expanding its use in central government spaces in the South, where it is not only unnecessary but also ill-fitted. There was an inevitable pushback; the hurried tabling of the delimitation bill served as the occasion to fight back. The chief minister of Tamil Nadu, M K Stalin, has spoken strongly against it, and in Parliament, Rahul Gandhi roused the Opposition to defeat the bill. While it has unfortunately delayed the reservation of seats for women, women’s reservation cannot credibly be postponed beyond the next Lok Sabha, to come into being in 2029.

Though some have claimed the defeat of the Bill as a victory for the South, it must actually be seen as a victory for the idea of a federal state, and more so for the idea of India as a space of diverse cultures regarded equally. It is essential that whatever emerges must aim at preserving the union at any cost while recognising the political aspect of the idea of India that it is a union of states. The divisive rhetoric of “unequal contribution” to the nation’s kitty, heard from the South, is best abandoned and the insistence on “one vote one value”, insisted upon from the North, is better ended.    

Having made their point, the political parties of the South must now turn their gaze inward to the inequality within their societies. This should not be difficult for them, as all of them place the ideal of social justice high on their agendas. Largely due to the programmes of their political parties, the southern states have travelled a considerable distance in that direction, depending on how the population is differentiated. Caste dominates politics here, and the improved condition of the scheduled castes is presented by political parties as evidence of justice.

The progress made on social justice is indisputable, but inequality remains. Take consumption, a proxy for the absent data on income distribution. Strikingly, the consumption level of the scheduled castes of Kerala and Tamil Nadu is higher than the national average for all social groups. But in these states, the gap between the scheduled castes and the best-off is greater than the national average. This is not acknowledged in the relentless messaging on the advancement of social justice by their governments, an effort that rivals the messaging by the present central government.

Moving beyond caste by widening the space over which inequality is considered, we find Kerala and Tamil Nadu losing their iconic status as forerunners of development. The Achilles’ heel of these states is women’s empowerment. On most indicators of well-being, notably the presence of anaemia and infant mortality, the women and girl children of these states do worse than their men. The proportion of women with anaemia is twice that of the men in these two southern states, which is higher than for India as a whole.  But it is when it comes to governance that the inequality is most stark. Two metrics of gender parity in governance, namely the proportion of women legislators and of women at the highest level of the judiciary would be relevant to the context. The proportion of women is 9 per cent in Kerala's legislature and 5 per cent in Tamil Nadu — far lower than the national average. When it comes to women judges in the high courts, Tamil Nadu does slightly better than the national average of 14 percent, but Kerala does far worse, with only 8 percent women judges In these two states, women are excluded from governance, even where they outnumber the men. Social justice has been imagined solely in terms of the distribution of goods, with power elided.

The failure of the three bills from being passed in the Lok Sabha need hardly cause despair. It has sent out momentous signals with a bearing on the future of democracy in India. First, the political class of a few northern states can no longer hope to dominate the world’s most heterogeneous polity. And, the southern states cannot continue to concentrate power in the hands of men.